Edward Masen's 1918 Chicago Blues
by badjujube
Summary: The last few months of Edward Masen's life prove to have the greatest impact on his future with Bella. It just takes 90 years to get there. Kinda canon except Bella who just is NOT herself. A love story, eventually. AU, Complete.
1. Chapter 1

_**Prologue:**_

_**2011**_

_ That homicidal fury in her face had returned and this time Jasper and Emmett weren't there to restrain her. _

_ "Isabella," I begged. "Please stop. There are better ways to deal with this. We've had a treaty with them for decades; we can work this out."_

_ "Work this out!" she raged at me. "Working out compromises is for humans and cowards. We are monsters, Edward, we don't have to negotiate with dogs while they hurt our families!"_

_ "Isabella, we are not monsters. If you go out there and slaughter those boys, you will ruin everything. Everything Carlisle has built, everything my family has worked for," my voice dropped. "Everything you and I have been working on." I begged her now with everything I had, there was no way I could stop her on my own and I had no idea where the rest of my family was._

_ "Edward, you know the choice I made last time I had to choose between you and my sister. Alice is my sister; don't make me hurt you like that again. Because I'll make the same choice."_

_ "Isabella, don't do this." I took one last stab at stopping her. "I won't…I can't look the other way again."_

_ There was a moment of quiet in her fury, an eye in the hurricane, she looked so sad, why was she always so sad?_

_ "I have to go get Alice." She turned from me and ran off into the trees. _

_ I had lost her again._

"…_There will be time, there will be time_

_To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;_

_There will be time to murder and create,…"_

_T.S. Eliot_

_The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock_

_1917_

**1918**

I rarely attended concerts with my father. Despite my love and respect for him I had always been much closer to my mother. She shared my interest in music and the arts, we spoke of literature, she had taught me to play the piano. I suppose these interests made me less than the manly ideal of pre-war Chicago, but I believed that my interest in baseball and fighting in the Great War compensated for my "artistic" tastes.

It was unfortunate that my mother felt unwell for on this particular evening we had highly coveted tickets to see the Chicago Symphony perform their now-famous interpretation of Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream. It was a warm spring night and my father and I walked the short distance to the Auditorium. The rustic, Italianate charm of the building complemented the piece perfectly and I was sorry that my mother had missed it.

I presumed that my father agreed to accompany me because there would be many of Chicago's elites there and he was a strong believer in always developing and nurturing influential contacts and acquaintances. It was a hobby he had always encouraged in me, as well. I was a hard sell, however, if a person was uninteresting to me or had what I perceived to be a character flaw, like vanity or shallowness I would refuse to pursue a relationship with them, no matter who their parents were or how much money their dowager aunt was going to leave them. It had long been a point of contention between my father and I.

My enjoyment of the music itself did not suffer from my mother's absence but I began to miss her keenly at the intermission. Where my mother and I would discuss the performance, my father insisted on introducing me to colleagues and their sweet, coy daughters, each girl glancing at me demurely and asking the same question, "How was I enjoying the concert?" I would have welcomed the question but that was the depth of interest these creatures had in the performance and the questions quickly turned to trivialities; their latest trip to Europe, movies, dances and the latest engagements and marriages.

I knew that I was attractive to these women, girls, really, I could read their glances, the tentative touch on my sleeve, the lowered head glances, the ringing, flirtatious laughter. I was of a respectable family, I had good manners and was that rare commodity in 1918: young man with affluent parents who was not in uniform nor appeared dissipated by Chicago's nightlife.

I was enduring the tender claws of a particularly tenacious young meat-packer's daughter when I caught the eye of an elegant man gliding through the marble lobby with 2 glasses of champagne. He was in his late 20's or early 30's, slender, with immaculate black hair and an aristocratic profile. He was dressed in what was clearly the fashion for New York or London, so he drew stares of admiration from the elite of this Midwestern city.

He gave me a smile and slowed his pace slightly to determine the source of my obvious discomfort, the aggressive flirtation of the girl clutching my arm. He caught the attention of a waiter and handing him the two glasses gestured to the stairs leading to the boxes. He then walked towards me and coming closer, waved amiably to my father standing a few feet from me, engrossed in conversation with the father of my admirer.

"Mr. Mason, I had no idea you were such a fan of the symphony," the man said, his English accent sounding upper class even to my relatively inexperienced ears.

"Tremont, I wouldn't miss such a performance," my father spoke, his admiration for the man clear in his posture and the warmth with which he spoke. I amused myself with the idea that my father would have to answer questions about the performance or the musicians since I had heard the familiar noise of my father's snores before we were 10 minutes into the first act.

"This must be your son," the man extended his hand to me and while shaking it drew me away from the young lady, nodding to her apologetically. She acquiesced with an awed smile, her attention clearly drawn from me to the dazzling smile of the man before me. If I weren't so relieved I would have been shocked by her inconstancy.

"This is my son Edward. Edward, this is Alec Tremont. A very good man to know." My father's tone made it clear that this man had a fortune; money was my father's greatest measure of a person's worth.

"Edward, delighted to meet you. Are you the music-lover that your father is?" Alec's smile was polite and correct but there was something in the look of amusement in his eyes that told me he knew my father couldn't tell a piano from a piccolo.

"I enjoy music a great deal, Mr. Tremont," I responded, smiling at him to show that I shared his amusement with my father's pretense.

"My son loves music more than anyone I've ever known, with the exception of his mother. He would rather play the piano than anything his father wants him to do." My father said this with affection but his belief in this statement was another reason my father and I were not terribly close. I was wryly amused that he turned this into praise when talking with this man.

"How wonderful," Mr. Tremont said, looking at me with admiration. "If I can impose, you must come and play for my wife and I. She is passionate about music as well and never had the opportunity to learn. My sister and I took lessons as children but we are pitifully bad, I'm afraid."

I had no opportunity to respond for just then the orchestra signaled the end of the intermission while my father enthusiastically gripped Alec Tremont's hand firmly.

"Edward would be thrilled," my father gushed. With this my father pulled me to the stairs leading to our seats with a grip and enthusiasm that recalled Miss Meat Packer earlier.

"A pleasure, Edward, Mr. Mason," Alec Tremont dipped his head slightly as we hustled away.

"You have no idea what an opportunity this is for you, Edward!" My father's enthusiasm was out of character and I decided that Mr. Tremont must have to wealth of Croesus to affect my practical, banker father this way.

I pondered my reaction to my newfound "connection". While he seemed kind and I was always pleased to meet people who could appreciate the arts and music the way my mother and I did I was somewhat taken aback to be befriended by a man so obviously of a different station than myself. I was a 17-year old boy; he was a man with wealth and position. The feeling of being friends with a man who made my father gush like a schoolgirl was somewhat awe-inspiring.

I let the issue slip to the back of my mind as I listened to the rest of the performance, my father was unusually alert for the second half, perhaps enervated by his dreams of my success under the protection of Alec Tremont. At the end of the performance we made our way back out to the lobby and through the masses of silk and wool. My father stopped to speak to a colleague he hadn't seen during the intermission and I signaled to him that I would meet him outside as I was reluctant to get caught by another set of coyly lowered lashes or fluttering hands.

I stepped outside into the cool spring evening and saw Alec Tremont waiting at the curb for the valet to get his car. Within seconds he was joined by two young women who assumed almost identical positions on either side of him.

The closest of these young women to me was of such small stature I would have sworn she was a child but her dress indicated that she was in her early 20's. She had very pale blonde hair and large blue eyes. She was dressed fashionably but somewhat demurely in pale blue silk with a white lace shawl wrapped around her shoulders. She looked at Alec with plain admiration in her eyes and clutched his hand in her tiny, gloved one while hanging on his words. He was telling the women a story in an animated fashion and as he gestured to illustrate his words he stepped back and revealed the other woman to me.

I probably gasped audibly; I know I stopped in my tracks when I saw the other woman. She was only slightly taller than the blond but still petite, but where the blond was child-like this woman was all curves and delicate bones. She was the most stunning thing I had ever seen; thick chestnut curls piled on her head accentuating long narrow neck, delicate bow-shaped mouth, and big, expressive, dark eyes with long black lashes. Her black silk dress accentuated her ivory skin, especially where her narrow waist lead up to her bust which was exposed in a way that was not exactly indecent but definitely daring for this crowd. While the blond and the other young women at the symphony were blushing, innocent flowers this woman was a sexual creature from her perfect, parted lips to her languid posture, leaning slightly on the arm of Alec Tremont while casting bemused glances to her other companion.

I had never desired a woman like this before in my life; what was horrifying to me was that I didn't feel the reverent, delicate, romantic feeling that I had always believed myself to be waiting for the right young lady to make me feel. I didn't feel like putting this woman on a pedestal, or rather I did, but then I wanted to immediately pull her right down off of it into my arms. I was shocked by the rawness, the sudden screeching halt to which my innocent ideals of love had come to and was appalled by the physical response I had to this woman I didn't even know. I felt as though I had been punched in the chest.

I don't know how long I was frozen there on the steps leading out of the concert hall but eventually her glance flickered over me neutrally. Alec's gaze followed hers and when he saw me he smiled and turned back to her. Leaning in to her he spoke, much too quietly for me to hear. In profile I could see a change come over her face from the amused smile to a look of…anger? I couldn't read what passed over her face but as her attention turned back to me quickly this time I saw a look I could only interpret as disdain wash over her and as smoothly as it had come her amused smile returned to her face.

I stood on the steps still frozen, perplexed, and changed by the events of the last few minutes. And then, as abruptly as the interlude came it passed, my father came up behind me signaling that he was ready to get home to his nightly brandy and cigar and the valet arrived to usher the trio into their shiny black car.

As my father swept me away I looked back but all I could catch of her was a black skirt sweeping into a black car. The pictures of her in my mind were much more vivid.


	2. Chapter 2

"_Do I dare_

_Disturb the universe?_

_In a minute there is time_

_For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse."_

_T.S. Eliot_

_The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock_

_1917_

**1918**

To say that my sleep was restless that night would have been an understatement. My sleep was non-existent; I lay awake thinking of the events of the evening and making wild conjecture based on what I had seen. I interpreted and reinterpreted the looks I had seen pass over her face, argued with myself as to whether she was Alec's wife or sister, and made dozens of different resolutions both to never accept an invitation from them and conversely to seek them out immediately. I swum in fantasy of her arms, lips, eyes as well as parts of her body I blushed to imagine.

This was not the way I had been raised and this was not the way I accustomed to feeling. I wanted to say that my world had tilted on it's axis and then realized that my world had developed a whole new axis and that axis was her. She was a pole that had impaled me and caused me to spin in an entirely new direction and I was dizzy from the shift.

I was accustomed to discussing everything I felt deeply with my mother but this was too horrifying, too personal and shocking. My mother taught me to view women as things to be treated reverently, respectfully and with delicate consideration. I could no sooner tell her that I was obsessed with ravaging a potentially married woman than I could reveal to her that I had decided to murder people and drink their blood for sustenance.

So I spent the next few days hiding from my mother's scrutiny. I slept late and ate infrequent meals alone at the table in the kitchen, I roamed the city on foot, haunting the library. I tried to play my piano but I couldn't find anything to play that expressed my feelings. Beethoven was too large, not personal enough, Ravel felt fussy and light. I pored over poetry, longing to find the words for my condition but I couldn't focus on what I read.

My mother, of course, knew that there was something wrong but I brushed off her light touch on my shoulder, her concerned looks. I knew that she was concerned for my health, with rumors of a flu epidemic coming to her ears from the gossip of her friends. I was able to assure her that I wasn't running a fever and that I felt fine but her concern continued.

Finally, after what felt like months but was in reality three days later, a message arrived addressed to me in elegant but masculine handwriting. My mother hovered as I opened it and I tried not to reveal the maelstrom of emotions that I was feeling as I read the short note inviting me for tea the following afternoon at the Tremont's home.

I breathed what I hoped was a subtle sigh of relief and looked at my mother's face. I could see concern and surprise on her features.

"The Tremont's?" she asked, "I had no idea you knew them, dear."

I was taken aback that my father hadn't told her of his triumph at my meeting Alec Tremont. He had been so thrilled, why wouldn't he share his dreams of my social success with her?

"Father and I ran into Alec Tremont at the symphony on Sunday." I tried to keep my tone as light as possible. "Do you know them?"

"No, I haven't had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Tremont," she responded just as lightly and seemed to have banished her concerns from her face as she smiled at me and asked somewhat tentatively, "Are you interested in going?" She gestured at the note in my hand. My mother knew that I had no compunction about refusing an invitation I was uninterested in.

"I might." I felt wound as tightly as a spring from the effort to hide my internal reactions from my mother. "Have you had a chance to read that novel Mrs. Wilcox lent you? I heard it was quite good." I changed the subject successfully and listened to my mother talk about a subject I had cared a great deal for only a few days previously. But this time I could hardly wait to escape to ponder my excitement and fear in the privacy of my room.

Further light was shed on the mystery of my mother's response later that evening. I was making my way upstairs after a restless evening in the library when I heard my mother's voice say the name "Tremont" in conversation with my father in her sitting room. I would normally be loathe to violate their privacy in this way but I admit that any information about that family was far too great a temptation to resist. I paused to listen, admittedly with shame.

"Elizabeth, you are peculiar on the subject of that family! This could be a great opportunity for Edward." I could hear my father becoming upset and my mother shushing him.

"I cannot help it, dear, I have heard such strange things about them, I worry about Edward falling in with the wrong people."

"It's not like you to judge a person on gossip, didn't you say you met the wife and sister knitting bandages for soldiers? They didn't do anything out of sorts, did they?" My father's voice had gotten closer and I feared discovery so I continued on to my room to reflect on what I had heard. Not that it would change my mind. I came to the conclusion that now that I could reject the advice of the person closest to me based on the overwhelming draw of my desire to possess a woman that I was now a grown man. I rather imagined that it was like this for every young man and I never knew it because I had lived in the rarefied world of my mother's influence, sheltered from the truths of men. I prepared myself for the world I was entering, that I imagined that I would enter the next day at the Tremont's house.


	3. Chapter 3

"_I met a lady in the meads, _

_Full beautiful, a fairy's child;_

_Her hair was long, her foot was light, _

_And her eyes were wild. "_

_La Belle Dame Sans Merci_

_John Keats_

_1819_

**1918**

I arrived at the townhouse of Alec Tremont a few minutes before I was expected the next day. I knew the home, it had been the home of Mary Castle, an intimidating old widow of a Civil War veteran who my mother had dragged me to visit with for years before her death a year before. She has passed away days after the U.S. had declared war on Germany and she had spent her final days bemoaning the fact that the "idiot men" had gotten themselves into another ridiculous war. She had admonished me not to break my dear mother's heart by enlisting; it was only my mother's influence that had kept me from lying about my age to join the war in Europe early, I had my heart set on joining the moment I turned 18.

I smoothed my hair for what must have been the twentieth time before ringing the doorbell. An English butler answered the door and greeting me by name, ushered me up to the parlor where I had spent many an afternoon watching my mother drink watery tea with Mrs. Castle.

The décor had changed for the better; the murky oil paintings and somber portraits had been replaced by landscapes and the occasional photograph. The velvet wallpaper had been torn down and the walls painted a creamy shade of white and flowers in glass vases sat on the surfaces of the room. A phonograph sat in the corner and a cabinet next to it was crammed with records and books had replaced the milkmaid figurines Mrs. Castle had collected.

I had just taken in these changes when the door opened again and the two women I had seen on Sunday came into the room. Both wore light spring clothes but again while the blond was the picture of propriety in flowered cotton, the woman with the dark hair dressed in a way that emphasized her figure, this time in dark blue with a wide sash around her slender waist and a lace blouse that complemented her delicate collarbone and the curve of her bosom. Her dark hair was in charming disarray, wisps of it falling down to her shoulders and her cheeks were flushed.

I drew in my breath and reminded myself that acting like a lustful fool would be unlikely to impress her and I was filled with uncertainty as to how she would receive me, given the way she had responded to me the night I first saw her.

"You must be Edward." She smiled warmly at me, her voice was low and she seemed somewhat out of breath. "I'm Isabella Tremont and this is my sister-in-law, Jane." She held out her hand and as I clasped it she covered our hands with her other hand lightly. I swore I felt a current, a sting of electricity on contact with her hand but I saw no change in her countenance to indicate that she felt it too. I convinced myself to let her hand go after several seconds for the sake of propriety and took the tiny hand of Jane in mine briefly, reluctantly.

"I must apologize for Alec," Jane said in a hushed, sincere voice. "He was detained in a meeting with bankers, or lawyers, or some such nonsense and will be late."

"Please don't apologize." I spoke with a smile, hoping I was as charming as I was trying to sound. "It's a pleasure to meet you both and this will give me a chance to monopolize you." I gave Isabella a broad smile, a smile my mother has assured me was dazzling and took the seat Jane offered.

Isabella took a seat on the couch and then jumped up immediately with an embarrassed smile.

"Oh, the tea! How thoughtless of me!" She began to walk over to ring the bell for the butler but tripped over an ottoman she clearly hadn't seen and almost lost her footing. I rose in an instance and although she had caught herself I took advantage of the opportunity to place my hands lightly on her elbows, turning her slightly so she was facing me again. I felt it again, that rush of electricity and I looked down at her flushed face as she blew out an embarrassed breath and bit her lip. My eyes were glued to her face and I felt a wave of arousal, as I'd never felt before. Jane's voice brought me back to my senses, thankfully.

"Isabella, sit down, you clumsy thing." I looked at Jane as I pulled away from Isabella, terrified that she saw my response to her sister. Amazingly, Jane looked at us without a trace of suspicion; she shook her head indulgently at Isabella and smiled at me apologetically.

"She's a bit of a magnet for disaster, Edward. I hope she hasn't injured you yet, too?" Jane rang the bell and sat down on the couch, leaving me to guide Isabella, who remained frozen where I left her, down beside her before taking my seat in the chair.

I floundered for a moment for an appropriate topic of conversation before seeing the book of poetry on the side table next to me. Surely, discussing Emily Dickenson was more suitable than asking Jane to leave so I could kiss her sister?

"Which one of you reads poetry?" I made a valiant effort to tear my eyes away from Isabella, now reanimated, to look at Jane periodically.

"Isabella is the poetry lover in the family." Jane smiled at her sister. Isabella looked at me with curiosity.

"Do you read poetry, Edward? I thought that American men didn't do that," she teased me gently, her eyes coming alive.

"I l_ove_ poetry, Isabella." I savored her name on my tongue as I leaned in towards her, astonished at my own forwardness.

The tea arrived and Isabella and I discussed our favorite poems. I was astonished to find that her taste in poetry was quite a bit more modern, while mine tended toward the traditional and romantic. Jane interjected infrequently but gave no impression of feeling excluded, which surprised me, considering the attention I was paying to her sister.

I found myself in the unprecedented, for me, position of flirting with a woman. What made it all the more enchanting and novel was that she was clearly flirting back, and in a much more appealing way than I had experienced heretofore. Where the innocent daughters of my parent's friends attempted to engage me with talk of dances and parties this woman spoke to me of words and ideas. What was more, she was physically appealing to me in a way that was almost daunting. My only frustration was that I had not found an acceptable way to ask if she was Alec Tremont's wife or sister. Neither of the women wore a wedding band and neither of them had a discernible accent to indicate where they had been raised.

After what was probably more than the acceptable time for a visit Jane rose from her seat, which signaled to me that it was time to go. Before I could leave, however, Isabella went to the shelves of books and pulled out a slender volume.

"You must read this, Edward. Your poetry background is shamefully mired in the last century." The smile she gave me as she said it softened the blow of the words and I was thrilled that I would have something of hers in my possession.

The cover of the book read, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot". I opened the cover of the book idly, wanting to draw out our parting. On the inside cover of the book in tiny, feminine script was written "Isabella Swan." I looked up at her with curiosity, hoping that my assumption was wrong.

"Swan is my maiden name," she spoke breezily, answering my unasked question. She held my gaze in a way that bespoke no regret at my discovery; I was taken aback as she had been clearly flirting with me for over an hour.

"I'm so sorry Alec missed you but it was nice to have you to ourselves." Jane smiled at me in a pale imitation of her sister's charm.

"You will have to come Saturday for our party," Isabella took my arm as we began to walk out of the parlor. "Alec said that you promised to play for me."

I looked at her, hanging on my arm, that current flowing between us, and stood on a moral precipice. I was infatuated with a married woman who behaved as though she shared my interest. It was a quandary that would have been easy to resolve before I had laid eyes on her but I now felt I had no control over.

She looked up at me with those expressive, deep eyes and I lost the power to chose anything but her.


	4. Chapter 4

"'…_And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, _

_Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"_

_The Second Coming_

_William Butler Yeats_

_1919_

**2010**

In the car on the way home from school Alice was translating Beatle's songs into Latin. She had gotten to the White Album and was struggling with the word for "raccoon" when I finally asked her.

"What, Alice? What are you hiding? You can't keep it up forever."

She turned to me with a look of anxiousness, not what I was expecting. Usually this little tactic of hers was to hide a gift she intended for me or to keep private some intimate tryst with Jasper, she would give me a mischievous grin and leak a detail or two to give me the reason for her hidden thoughts. The concern on her face was new.

"I think that it would be thoughtful if you were to go visit the Denali's for Easter. You and Emmett and Rosalie could take Esme and visit over the break." We were a week away from spring break at Fork's High School where we maintained the pretense of being teenagers so that Carlisle could practice medicine and we could live a life as something like a family.

"I hate visiting the Denali's. Tanya is all over me like a wet shirt." I smiled as I used Emmett's image for the way this beautiful vampire just wouldn't take no for an answer from me. "Why the sudden suggestion, Alice? I know this isn't about concern for our vacation plans."

"I…have a friend coming to visit." Alice's eyes were on the road and she continued her translations. "You won't like it. My friend doesn't share our diet."

"Alice, that's incredibly risky! You can't let some old friend of yours blow our cover!"

Alice turned to me with as much emotion in her face as I had ever seen. "It's not someone I can turn away, Edward! You just need to trust me that you don't want to be here." She turned back to the passing road and resumed her translations, this time switching to Britney Spears lyrics, driving me out of her thoughts, screaming like a 6 year old whose seen a spider.

I was torn. I trusted Alice implicitly, the advice she gave based on her visions had proven invaluable over and over again. On the other hand I felt immensely protective of our life, our façade of a normal human family. I had struggled with my nature for nine decades, living as a family and denying my thirst for human blood was the closest I could get to being the man my mother had raised me to be. Alice could be sentimental; I feared that she was incapable of underestimating the threat her friend could pose.

Alice stopped trying to convince me to leave, probably knowing that the harder she pushed the more concerned I would likely become. I made my decision to stay; my discomfort for a few days of her houseguest had to be more manageable than worrying about my family in my absence. After all, I was a mind reader who had attended high school nearly a dozen times, if I could manage hearing the thoughts of millions of hormonal teenagers and thousands of disgruntled teachers I could handle an unpleasant vampire.

Alice made herself scarce for the next few days, skipping school and avoiding my presence at home. Her husband and I were playing with our food in the cafeteria the following Wednesday when he received a text message on his phone.

"Alice says it's your last chance to change your mind." Jasper said as he slipped his phone back into his pocket and glanced at me with concern. I tried to look into his thoughts but he was masking anything he knew as well.

"What's so bad about this mystery guest, Jasper? Does he have really icky thoughts? Does he like Thomas Kincaid paintings and Celine Deon?" I smiled at Jasper, trying to coax anything out of him he would give. I knew that Alice usually shared everything with him.

"I don't know, Edward," Jasper lied to me. I could see anxiety on his face.

Just then Emmett and Rosalie joined us at the table.

"What's with the cold shoulder, Champ?" Emmett grinned at me. "I heard Alice is so desperate to get you out of the house she convinced Tanya to go to Moscow for Easter so you could visit the Denali's." I hadn't heard this but it steeled my resolve to stay.

"You could go if you like, Emmett. I'm sure everything is coming out of hibernation about now. Should be your idea of good eating." I smiled at my guileless brother. I could tell he knew nothing about Alice's friend, his thoughts were as easy to read as a picture book.

"Alaska is no fun without you running from Tanya." Rosalie laughed.

"Yeah, remember the time you slept outside for a week because she was waiting in your bed?" Emmett laughed loudly and elbowed me. I was reminded suddenly of the lengths that I would go to as a human to disengage from flirtatious girls. My mind went back to the summer I was changed and my mood turned black.

"I'm going to class early." I rose without looking at my siblings but I could hear the exasperation in their minds; Emmett thought that a night or two with Tanya was probably the best thing I could do, Rosalie didn't care what I did as long as I wasn't so self-absorbed and moody, ironic since she had a virtual undead monopoly on those traits, and Jasper felt concern, no, that wasn't strong enough, _fear_ for me.

Anxious and upset by the path my reflections had taken into the past, I was unwilling to hear my siblings thoughts for me a moment longer so I fled to Biology and the strangely welcome banality of Mr. Banner's fantasy baseball team.


	5. Chapter 5

"…_Being your slave, what should I do but tend _

_Upon the hours and times of your desire?_

_I have no precious time at all to spend, _

_Nor services to do, till you require…"_

_Sonnet 57_

_William Shakespeare_

_1599_

**1918**

In the days following I attempted to behave in as expected a fashion as possible for the benefit of my mother, to assuage her fears. I reported to her that I found the Tremont's perfectly respectable and cultured and was careful to not speak of Isabella too much, a difficult task given my growing infatuation. I even gave subtle indications of being mildly interested in Jane, a concept that I could tell my mother was thrilled by, although she tried to hide her enthusiasm. I knew that the my mother would be overjoyed if I were to begin a courtship as she assumed it would prevent me from enlisting in the army, an ambition I had long held.

The day after that auspicious tea I accompanied my mother, as I was accustomed, to the home of one of her acquaintances so she could knit bandages and socks for the soldiers abroad. I was expected to read to the women while they worked but after an hour I found myself in need of air and excused myself to step outside.

Once outside I let out a deep breath and was allowing myself to think again of Isabella when I was interrupted by a small, girlish voice saying my name quite close.

"Edward?" I looked up quickly, not realizing that I had shut out my surroundings so completely. It was Jane, standing a few feet from me on the sidewalk, bundled up against the late spring chill in a fashionable coat and ribbon-trimmed hat. She had a scrap of paper in her hand and a tentative smile on her face.

"Jane," I exhaled, disappointed to not see Isabella with her but feeling as though she was the next best thing, a connection to the woman I was infatuated with. "How unexpected! What brings you here?"

"Isabella is visiting a sick friend in the country until tomorrow morning and I was invited by Mrs. Ross to help pack bandages." She smiled at me shyly and gestured to the piece of paper in her hand. "Alec is at his club so I walked from there because it was such a pretty day but I got a bit turned around. Is this it?" She gestured to the house behind me.

"This is it, prepare yourself to be colossally bored, however. They have been so busy talking that few bandages have been made today. A tragedy for the war effort, really." She and I laughed easily and made our way back inside.

My mother, of course, was delighted to see her. I suspected she thought that we had engineered our meeting but would have approved thoroughly if we had. As I had told Jane, there was little for her to do and within an hour she was idle and looking towards the door.

"Edward, why don't you walk Miss Tremont back downtown?" My mother spoke with a coy smile. "I'm afraid she'll get lost again."

I leapt at the chance to get out of the house while being given an opportunity to mine Jane for information about her sister-in-law.

"An excellent idea, Mother. Indeed, what would come of the war effort if we lost Miss Tremont?" I smiled at Jane mirthfully.

"Edward, for shame!" My mother batted at my arm playfully while Jane smiled and gathered her things. I could tell from the looks and smiles in the room that my mother wasn't the only one imagining they were looking at the early stages of a courtship. The thought gave me a pang of guilt, that I was deceiving my mother and all of her social circle, not to mention Jane, but the thought of Isabella pushed the feeling to the back of my mind.

Jane and I both let out a sigh of relief when we got outside; it was a joy to be out of those rooms with their buzz of gossip and the expectant eyes of our elders.

We began the short walk downtown and I was struck by how comfortable I felt in Jane's presence. It was nothing like the fierce tension between desire and propriety I had felt interacting with Isabella. With Jane I felt comfortable and like she was interested in my happiness in a way I couldn't explain but appreciated immensely.

We exchanged our shared enjoyment of the previous day's visit and Jane expressed her hope that I would be able to come for the party the following night. In those days it was custom to say things like "I wouldn't miss it for the world." But when I said that to her I meant it. And what was more; I sensed that Jane knew that I was sincere.

It was actually a short walk to Alec's club, the same one my father belonged to, so I had no opportunity to coax my siren's name out of Jane's mouth before we had turned the corner a block away from our destination.

Jane's benign gaze was drawn upwards briefly and I saw a look of surprise flicker across her face. I began to look up but she suddenly grasped my arm and pulled me to face her. I had never seen Jane move so quickly or betray such anxiety.

"Edward, you know, we are so glad we met you!" She smiled up at me broadly. "We enjoyed your visit so much, especially Isabella."

At the mention of her name my scrutiny was drawn away from the street ahead of us where I was looking for the cause of her startled response and was pulled back to her words. Jane smiled to confirm her words.

"Isabella really enjoyed meeting you, she said she thought you were fascinating and…" Jane looked down coyly, as if deciding whether to say what was on the tip of her tongue. "She said she thought you were very handsome."

Jane blushed at this indiscretion but my heart soared. I had to look away from her to conceal my feelings and I looked back to the entrance of the club.

I was puzzled at what I saw and I realized that this was what Jane was trying to conceal from me. Alec Tremont was getting out of a cab parked on the busy street. As I watched someone seemed to call him from inside and he leaned back in to speak to him or her. I couldn't make out anything of the person in the backseat but I could see him lean in quite close. Jane saw where my attention had gone and tugged on my sleeve again but I continued to watch the episode before me. Alec got back out of the cab after a moment with a private, pleased smile on his face and adjusting his collar walked into his club.

I looked back to Jane who was still looking at me with a shy smile. She gave no indication of having seen what I had witnessed.

"Isabella and I are looking forward to seeing you tomorrow night." She spoke without embarrassment this time, as if we had a shared understanding.

"Tell her…" I paused, knowing that I was hanging on to the edge of propriety entertaining giving a potentially intimate message to a married woman. "Tell her I am filled with anticipation as well." I gave Jane what I hoped was an appropriately neutral smile but I was thrilled and terrified at the hidden message in my words.

I bid her farewell abruptly. I could hardly stand to be with another person, even one as intimate with the object of my desires. I needed to be away from people to think over the meaning of the things I had seen and heard today.


	6. Chapter 6

**a/n: I should take this opportunity to mention my non-ownership of Twilight and it's characters, plot, etc. Also, this is my favorite ending of any chapter.**

"_I made a garland for her head, _

_And bracelets too, and fragrant zone; _

_She look'd at me as she did love, _

_And made sweet moan. "_

_La Belle Dame Sans Merci_

_John Keats_

_1819_

**1918**

In the day I had to wait to see Isabella again I pondered what I had seen and heard. Isabella thought me handsome; she looked forward to seeing me again. I was ecstatic to hear these things from Jane and yet part of me wondered what her motivation was. I couldn't shake the feeling that Jane was encouraging my wholly inappropriate interest in her brother's wife.

Additionally, I had the events I had witnessed outside Alec's club to mull over in my head. He was supposed to have been at the club and yet we saw him arrive. He was sharing the cab with someone, he spoke to the inhabitant of the cab in an intimate way, yet from what Jane had told me it was not Isabella. Was Alec having an affair? I experienced a flush of shame at the hope I felt at that possibility. If he were betraying her perhaps she would no longer wish to be with him. A divorce was an ugly experience for Isabella to have to endure but if she were to choose to be with me afterwards it would be the most desirable possible scenario.

I continued to indulge in these dishonorable and selfish fantasies as I prepared carefully to see her Saturday evening. My mother was pleased to see me go to the Tremont's home this time so my parents were both ebullient as I left home that evening.

Arriving at their home just after dark I could see the whole house lit up and heard music and voices coming out of the open windows. I entered their home and immediately sought out Isabella. I found her in the larger living room that the late Mrs. Castle had used for formal parties. She was even more beautiful than the image of her I dwelled upon in my daydreams.

She wore a dark green, tiered dress whose hem was high enough to reveal her delicate ankles and lower calves. Her dark brown hair was piled loosely on top of her head and her bow-shaped mouth was darkened with lipstick. She wore a large, rectangular emerald pendant around her neck that drew my eyes to her cleavage.

She was sitting on one of the velvet couches, encircled by several men whose faces were familiar to me from the social circle my parents and I moved in. She held a glass in her hand and as I saw her she was tilting her head back in laughter at something one of the men had said.

She saw me as I got closer and rose so swiftly she jostled one of the men standing closest to her.

"Edward!" She held out her empty hand to me and I took it, drawing her away from the circle of men who I now hated but gave a polite smile to.

"Isabella, you look lovely." I breathed in her scent: perfume, alcohol she'd been drinking and her own, warmer scent. I pulled her to another couch, surprised at how pliant she was in my arms and reveling in how she leaned on me.

"I'm so glad you're here. You have to play for me!" She was warmth and seduction and I wanted nothing more than to play for her except that that would draw me away from our place together on the couch.

"Absolutely," I gave her a smile. "Just as soon as this butcher finishes with Ravel's carcass I will play anything you like." I gestured to the man playing the piano at the other end of the room.

"Isabella, your glass is empty. And Edward has no glass! What kind of a party will he think this is?" I turned to see Alec Tremont standing behind the couch with two glasses of wine in his hands. I experienced a flash of terror that he would roust me from his house for my intimacies with his wife but he handed Isabella and I the glasses in his hands, taking her empty one and giving me a broad smile.

"Edward, my apologies for missing you at tea, I wish I could say that the company was better but I am forever meeting with bankers and lawyers. No offense to your father, of course." Alec came around to the other side of the couch and although I rose to meet him he gestured for me to stay seated next to his wife. Was he blind?

At that moment the man at the piano got up to a smattering of applause and Isabella rose and grabbed my hand.

"Edward is going to play for me, Alec." They shared a brief look I couldn't read and Alec smiled at me genuinely.

"Thank you, Edward. I can buy her records but it's nothing like seeing someone talented perform for her." Alec moved out of our way as she led me to the piano.

"Do you have any requests, Isabella?" I leaned close to her before she could take a seat, knowing that playing for her gave me the upper hand.

She gazed up at me and parted his red lips slightly. I was mesmerized, staring down at her. She reached out and ran a single finger down my lapel and I looked down to see that she was wearing her wedding band before looking back into her deep brown eyes. She gave me a small smile before breathing, "Whatever you want, Edward."

She took a seat next to the piano and when I had command of my limbs and brain I sat down at their beautiful piano and contemplated how to best press my advantage. Looking at her delicate beauty I decided upon Chopin and began to play, looking only at the keys and her face as I played the pieces I had practiced to perfection under my mother's tutelage. As I played I felt as though we were alone in the room, despite the party guests, that the world had been reduced down to the piano, this beautiful creature and myself.

I played uninterrupted for nearly an hour, with only her smiles and quiet words of encouragement. The interlude was brought to an end by a particularly loud blast of laughter from across the room and just like that the mood was broken and we were in a room full of people. I felt exposed, vulnerable; I had no idea what we looked like to these people because I had been mindful of nothing else but the piano and her expressive face.

Isabella looked at the source of the interruption with all the frustration I felt and then looked back at me with a look as if she was trying to resolve something. Suddenly, she seemed to make up her mind and she rose from her seat and crossed the few feet of floor to where I sat. She sat down on the piano bench and slid over to where I sat, her eyes locked on me the whole time.

I knew that I should look up to see who was witnessing this but my eyes were pinned to her face. She looked predatory as she slid her hand up my arm from my elbow towards my shoulder and licked her lips. I could feel that now-familiar electric surge from her touch.

"Eddie," she said seductively, lowering her gaze at me. "Do you ever play jazz?"

_ Jazz?_


	7. Chapter 7

"_At times, indeed, almost ridiculous— _

_Almost, at times, the Fool."_

_T.S. Eliot_

_The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock_

_1917_

**1918**

"Do I play jazz?" I looked at Isabella blankly. It was the last thing I expected to come out of her mouth.

"Come on, Eddie. Let me play something for you." She smiled at me seductively and pulled on my arm. I jumped up with unseemly enthusiasm.

She was slightly unsteady on her feet. I suspected that she had had more to drink than the two glasses of wine that I had seen. She led me to the smaller parlor where we had first had tea. The door had been closed and the room was empty. She led me over to the phonograph and sat down on the floor next to it and looked through the cabinet I had seen stuffed with recordings.

"Do me a favor, sweetheart, and grab me a drink?" She spoke to me without looking up and although I was worried about her level of inebriation her calling me "sweetheart" trumped my concerns.

I fetched her another glass of wine and slipped back into the parlor, looking around before entering the room.

"Here it is!" Isabella pulled a record off of the shelf and placed it on the phonograph. She placed the needle on the groove of the black disc and closed her eyes waiting for the music to begin. As the music began she glided over to me and pulled me down on the couch next to her. She remained there holding my hand as the wild music filled the room. I had never heard anything like it, jazz music had been popular in the clubs of Chicago for a few years now but mother and I had perceived it to be dissolute and not as pure as classical music.

Listening to it in this room with this beautiful, exciting woman holding my hand I could relate to the music coming from the phonograph. I had a fanciful notion that this was the music that would have accompanied my fantasies of Isabella.

The song ended too quickly but not before I had resolved to learn to play it as soon as I could. Silence filled the room and Isabella still held my hand. She looked at me with a smile for the secret that we shared and my gaze slipped down to her delectable mouth. I felt that I could kiss her now and she would not object. I was weighing my decision to do just that when the door opened suddenly and a young woman I had never seen before looked in. She looked somewhat out of place for the crowd at this party; her clothes were a little older and not quite the fashion of the day.

"Oh, I'm so sorry! I was looking for my brother!" The girl was obviously embarrassed by her intrusion and she quickly turned and left the room. I was torn between fury at her interruption and fear for the consequences to Isabella's reputation.

"I'd best go find Walter." Isabella sighed and rose from the couch with a look of regret. "He's probably collapsed under a table." We laughed and she made her way to the door with me following along, refusing to let go of her hand.

"I'll go see if I can say hi to Jane." I spoke casually, wondering idly if Isabella would be jealous of her sister-in-law.

"I'll see you in a minute," she smiled at me, and squeezed my hand fondly before pulling away,

I made my way back into the biggest parlor and looked for Jane. It was getting late and there were only a few people left. I saw no sign of her on this floor so I made my way downstairs. I knew the house quite well from my visits here as a child. There were no guests in the back part of the house where the kitchen and pantry were located but I knew that there was a housekeeper's office in the back that I suspected would be a good place to hide from a noisy party for a quiet young lady like Jane.

I was halfway down the darkened hallway when the door to the office opened and Alec came out in the company of a young man. They were laughing and Alec had his hand on the boy's shoulder. The boy was dressed in a rumpled vest and coat that looked like they had been his fancy dress for quite a few years and he had the look of someone who worked for a living in his hands and face.

"Walter, your sister has been looking for you." Jane's voice came from behind me.

Walter looked at Alec and then back at Jane, rubbing the back of his neck nervously, clearly at a loss for words.

"Walter, why don't we have my driver take your sister home, that way we can continue our discussion." Alec smiled smoothly.

Walter nodded quickly and took off up the stairs to find his sister. Alec fixed his gaze on me.

"Edward, I hope you are enjoying yourself. It's so kind of you to play for Isabella." Alec continued walking towards me in the hallway, taking Jane's elbow as he reached us and began to guide us upstairs. Isabella stood in the hallway looking anxious. She scanned our faces as we approached her.

"Isabella, dear, you look exhausted. You should get yourself upstairs to bed right away." Alec held her chin in his hand and looked into her face. She gave him a look of annoyance and pulled back slightly from his hand to glance at me. I saw a conflict in her eyes.

"Come, Jane, get Isabella upstairs. We have to care for our little sisters, don't we?" Alec spoke to Jane but his eyes were fixed on Isabella's face.

Isabella nodded slightly in resignation and without looking at me said, "Goodnight, Edward." She walked slowly down the hallway with Jane at her side. Jane looked back over her shoulder and tried to give me a reassuring smile but I was despondent.

All of my ridiculous fantasies of Isabella and I together were crushed again in that moment when her husband gave her an order and she followed it without even looking back at me. The brief interaction summed up the absurdity of my infatuation with her. She had meant nothing with her glances and touches; she belonged entirely to her husband.


	8. Chapter 8

**1937**

I sat in the darkest corner of a tiny, ramshackle jazz club on the outskirts of Los Angeles waiting for the man I'd decided to murder to return. I'd seen in his head a series of dramatically underage girls he had gotten drunk and forced himself on, I'd had to wait here most of the day for the sun to go down so that I could follow him home and finish him. I hated Los Angeles, the sun made it completely inhospitable, but the influx of people escaping from the failing farms in the south and Midwest made it an excellent place to find people who deserved to die.

"Deserved to die." I mused upon the way I had chosen to live for the past few years. I rejected the lifestyle of my creator, my father, Carlisle, and chose to spend my days, well nights, really, searching the thoughts of the humans around me and finding the murderers, rapists and pimps of the cities of America and feeding upon their blood. I was aware that I was playing God, but in my arrogance I asked myself who better to play God than someone of my abilities and gifts? It wasn't a rationale or a life that I was entirely comfortable with but I also wasn't ready to go back to my previous existence with Carlisle and Esme, frozen at the edge of the world of humans, desperate to "pass", with no mate and no passion for anything but my piano.

Piano. Just then the old black man at the piano finished his break and began to play again. To my astonishment he began to play "Livery Stable Blues" on the rickety, out-of-tune piano, the song Isabella had played for me the night she had asked me I ever played jazz, the night she held my hand on the couch in her parlor. I knew how to play this song on the piano; I had found the piano arrangements for this and a few other jazz songs in a shabby music store in Chicago the next day. The old man who sold them to me had looked at me with a knowing smile.

"Do you know, son, they say this is what they play downstairs when you lose your innocence." The seedy-looking man working the counter gave me a knowing smile and I was chagrinned to think that that was exactly what I was trying to do by learning to play jazz.

The memory and the music in the bar combined with my boredom and I slipped into my own thoughts.

_I was playing this song at that untuned upright piano, my sleeves were rolled up and I dressed in the appropriately shabby vest and tie. I had a drink and cigarette on the top to perfect the façade. I could hear the mumbles and shouts at the bar, smell the perfume, cigars, dirt, booze and pumping blood. I heard a glass slam down, laughter and seductive whispers. I played the pumping rhythm with my left hand while my long white hand played the melody, improvising to fill the space where horns would be in a band. I heard a clear, high woman's voice say, "Bella" and my head shot up to look while my hands continued to caress the keys. _

_ She was walking towards me, not the Isabella of 1918 but her 1930's incarnation, dark patterned silk dress coming up almost to her knees, short sleeves and an open collar exposing her pale, perfect skin. She wore no stockings in the Los Angeles heat and her long, lush hair was pulled back into a messy bun to keep it off of her neck. She wore black liner on her deep, dark eyes and her lips were as red as blood. _

_ "Eddie," she breathed, stalking closer until she was at my side, her delicate hand on my shoulder, I noticed that she wore no wedding ring now, not that that had ever meant anything with her._

_ "Eddie, you know I love the way you play jazz." She slipped down closer to purr in my ear. Isabella's advances and flirtatiousness had often misled me but my sensitive nose picked up a scent that she could neither fake nor conceal. I could smell her arousal and I growled._

_ I pulled her body to in front of where I sat on the piano stool and set her roughly down on the keys of the piano, smashing them down into a discordant combination of notes. The keys on the upright was so narrow that I had to hold her in place with one hand while I stood up and used the other hand to grip her jaw and hold it in place while I pressed my lips to hers hungrily. This was the opposite of our only other kiss, rough and unapologetic where that one had been sweet and careful. I used my thumb to force her lower lip open and pressed my mouth and tongue into hers so hard that her shoulders were pushed backwards into the top of the piano._

_ I pulled my mouth back from her to look at her; she was looking back at me with lust in her eyes and her mouth parted. Her chest was arching towards me so I removed my hand from her jaw and slipped it down to her breast. I used my thumb to rub roughly against her hard nipple and encouraged by her gasp I squeezed her with my fingers. I could feel her thighs and knees move against me so I slipped my hand down to hem of her dress and slipped my hand back up her thighs, pulling her dress up and parting her legs at the same time. I pressed hardness into her and supporting her against the piano with my body thrust against her._

_ She gasped and said my name and wrapped her hands around my upper arms; I couldn't care about the other people in the room, or hurting her or her blood. I pulled back and again, bracing her against the piano with one arm I slipped my other hand up her leg to her center. She was so aroused I could feel it through her undergarments. I pulled them away from her and they were torn to shreds in my hand. I slipped my hand between the lips of her sex and had a moment of focus while I rummaged through the hundreds of thoughts I'd heard in the minds of men and women about how this part worked. I had a dark moment of amusement that had Isabella allowed me to do this when I was a 17 year old human she would have liked the experience infinitely less than she would now. Although I lacked practical experience I had my heightened senses and thoughts of others to guide me._

_ Isabella gasped again as I found her sensitive bundle of nerves and pressed on it and then slipped two fingers into her. She slipped her hands up my arms and locked her arms around my neck. "Please, Edward!" she begged into my hair where she had pressed her face. I continued the deliberate stroking with my fingers._

_ "Isabella, do you want me?" I asked teasingly, I could smell, I could feel what she wanted. _

_ "Please, Edward." I undid my belt and pants and thrust into her with one steady motion; she wrapped her legs around my waist. I tried to move slowly, to prolong the act but I couldn't help myself, being inside her, finally, made me frantic. We were quickly caught up in a driving, jerking rhythm, her moans and arms and legs around me spurring me on, the piano hitting discordant keys as we moved against it. I clutched the hair at the nape of her neck to turn her mouth back up to mine and I tried to kiss her but ended up moaning into her mouth as I felt her hips jerk towards me. I lacked the precision to kiss her lips at this point, I was lost in the sensations, we lacked art or technique in our attempts to find release with each other._

_ I could hear from her voice and her breath that she was nearing release and I struggled to hold off until she got there. Finally, her head tilted back and she cried out as I felt her tighten around me, pulling me with her over the edge. I pressed myself against her violently, slamming her into the piano one last time as I roared with pleasure and then shook with the intensity of the sensations._

_ I stayed leaning into her, her face pressed against my chest as I composed myself. I found myself pondering that of all the times I had fantasized about this act, I had never imagined it like this; selfishly coupling on horrifically bad piano in a filthy bar in a town I hated with the woman who had destroyed me and who had been dead for seventeen years. Dead for seventeen years…I realized that in all my glorious sensations of Isabella, including the sensation of my returning hardness nestled inside her I hadn't heard her heartbeat._

_ I pulled away from her to look at her face and to my horror what I had taken in the dim light to be her dark brown eyes were red, like mine. I ran my hands across her perfect, white face and across her marble shoulders. She looked at me tenderly, lustfully and smiled, revealing her sharp, white teeth._

_ "Isabella, how?" My voice came out in a whisper and I squeezed her cold white arms in my hands to verify with touch what I could see and hear and smell was true. I heard the sound of shattering glass very close and was brought back…_

"Buddy, are you ok?" I was looking at the ruddy face of the man I had been waiting for. Broken glass was spread all over the table at which I sat and in a wide circle around me. I had squeezed the glass in my hand, the prop I had ordered to pass for human in this place. I was horrified and furious with myself that I had lost track of where I was and indulged in a full blown sexual fantasy in a public place. Had I said anything? Had I humped the piano or called out her name? I searched the thoughts of the people around me. I couldn't see anything but me breaking the glass and ignoring the female patrons who had tried to get my attention. Still, I felt like I had let my control slip and that made me angry and nervous.

"I'm quite good, thank you." I stood up smoothly and wiped my hands on my pants. I had to get out of here quickly. I made up my mind to leave without him when I saw that he had returned with a companion. A skinny, underdressed girl not older than thirteen or fourteen hovered behind him somewhat unsteadily.

"Actually, I think I've cut myself." I slit my own palm with my thumbnail behind my back and then showed him the tiny trace of blood on my hand. Thankfully, I had fed a few days before or nothing would have come out. "Would you be so kind as to show me the men's room?"


	9. Chapter 9

"_She walks in beauty—like the night _

_Of cloudless climes and starry skies, _

_And all that's best of dark and bright _

_Meet in her aspect and her eyes;…"_

_Hebrew Melodies_

_Lord Byron_

_1815_

**2010**

I drove home in a mixture of anxiousness and resentment. I wish I could say that this kind of emotional state was unfamiliar to me but as much as I tried to present a front of stoicism to the world my family knew that I struggled with the regrets and self-doubt that the last few months of my human life and the reality of living as a monster in the world of humans engendered.

I warred constantly with the chasm between who I wanted to be, the man my mother had raised me to be and the choices that I had made, as an immortal and as a 17 year old human. I know that Rosalie and Emmett found my moral conflict and frequent moodiness alternately amusing or aggravating. Jasper suffered from the effect of being exposed to my angst for the last 60 years but he had sympathy for me, as well. Esme and Carlisle loved me like a son and my moods worried them but it also gave them purpose the way caring for a child does in a human family. Which left Alice.

Where could I begin with Alice? I was closer to Alice than any of my other siblings, in part because of the mixed blessing of our gifts. My ability to read minds and her visions of the future had helped our family countless times in ways both large and small but they also came with a burden. We were not only unable to live spontaneously, truly in the present, but we had to make constant editorial decisions about what to share and what to conceal from our family.

Alice understood me as no one else did and she desperately wanted me to be happy. This was causing me a great deal of guilt at the present moment because I knew that her warnings had been heartfelt and with the best intentions. I simply couldn't heed them.

In my contemplation of my relationship with Alice I found myself for the second time today thinking of 1918. Alice's care for me had many times reminded me of my dealings with Jane. What if Jane had warned me? I had always felt that she wanted me to be happy, I saw now that I was, even as a human, unusually perceptive where it came to people. I believed, and Carlisle had agreed with me, that this gift had simply been enhanced by the change. I had always felt that Jane cared for me, wanted the best for me in the same way that Alice did. But where Alice's advice had proven itself to be in my best interest, Jane's influence had led to the greatest heartbreak of my life, mortal and immortal.

As soon as I had this thought it I knew it didn't ring true. I was forced to admit that I would have followed the path that led to Isabella even if Jane had attempted to block it. I was frustrated with myself for even thinking of this, for dwelling on the painful events of nearly a century ago and trying to blame a long-dead girl for an emotional apocalypse I had walked into willingly, eagerly.

I arrived home in this furious, unsettled state and immediately could smell the presence of another vampire. An unfamiliar vampire but with a hint of something familiar I couldn't place. The visitor had been here but had left, as far as I could tell. I was having trouble being precise as my attention was divided by my attempt to identify the other scent.

I walked in the house to a welcoming committee of my whole family, with the exception of Alice. All were watching me with almost identical caution and concern.

"You would think I was a _real_ disturbed teenager from the looks on your faces." I grumbled to my family as I tried to slip past Emmett to go upstairs to my room.

"Edward, don't." Carlisle spoke from his place on the couch as Emmett put his huge arm out to stop me.

The only member of this family who could tell me what to do had spoken. I stopped and with a glare turned to face my creator.

"What, Carlisle? The guest is gone; I want to go upstairs. Even if Count Dracula is coming back I can just wait it out in my room." I pleaded with Carlisle with my eyes. I felt profoundly miserable and the presence of Rosalie and an obnoxious houseguest would in no way remedy that.

"You are not going to be able to do that, Edward. She's coming back and you made the decision not to go to Alaska so you'll have to face her."

_She. _Finally a hint. I sniffed the air again to see if I could identify the familiar scent. It was something…something I hadn't smelled in a long time, something like…

_ "Chicago, 1918."_ It was Alice's thoughts, Alice's voice. She was coming closer and she was…telling the visitor about me?

"This is boring, I can watch Edward get upset any day." Rosalie rolled her eyes and started to leave the room, pulling Emmett with her.

"I think you need to stay, Emmett. Edward might need some help." Jasper spoke suddenly and I looked at him, astonished. What could Emmett help me with? Cheat codes for Grand Theft Auto?

Before I could ask the door flew open, bouncing back so hard off the inside wall that one of the hinges broke and Esme's beautiful stain-glass inlay shattered.

"YOU!" A darkly clad, chestnut-haired creature burst into the room and fixed her eyes on me, taking on a crouching attack position that our kind adopted out of instinct.

Her scent flooded towards me as I took in her presence. In ninety years her image hadn't faded from my mind, she still stunned me with her beauty. Instead of the flowing dresses of 1918 she wore dark pants and a sweater, covered up with a wool coat, her hair flowed down loose the way I had only seen it once before, _the last time I saw her._

"Isabella," I breathed out her name, still reverent after all these decades.

This seemed to infuriate her further and she lunged at me, teeth bared, red eyes burning, acting without strategy, intent only on ending me.


	10. Chapter 10

"_The best lack all conviction, while the worst _

_Are full of passionate intensity."_

_The Second Coming_

_William Butler Yeats_

_1919_

**1918**

I didn't hear from the Tremont house for a week. I was in agony. Although I told myself that I had accepted the reality of Isabella's unavailability I continued to think of her, fantasize about her and replay the events of our brief acquaintance over in my mind endlessly.

I maintained as good a façade for my mother as I could. We discussed books, I played the piano, and I accompanied her to tea and for volunteer work. I was hoping to encounter Jane again, at a minimum, seeing Isabella about town would have been sublime. I found myself turning to look at any female figure that could have been either of them; I suppose making me look like a complete cad in my attentions to the gentler sex. I _was_ a complete monster but only in my feelings for one woman in particular, my elusive Isabella.

My mother finally commented after a week that I had not seen Jane in recent days and I managed to blithely suggest that she invite the Tremont ladies for tea. My mother jumped at the chance to encourage the courtship she imagined was taking place between the two of us and Isabella and Jane were invited for tea the following week.

I wound myself into a near frenzy as the day they were expected but I had an outlet in teaching myself to play a few pieces of jazz music on the piano that I was able to find the arrangements for. My mother looked at me somewhat askance but I told her that I thought that it would help my classical playing by allowing me to work on my manual dexterity and timing. How I managed to spit that out so sincerely was a testament to how skilled I was becoming at deceiving my mother.

I found the playing to be exhilarating and somewhat arousing, the former I attributed to the more fluid compositions and pacing while the latter was surely due to the effect I imagined my playing these songs would have on Isabella.

The time for them to arrive came on a warm, late spring day but the Tremont's car pulled up to discharge only Jane. I walked to greet her, hoping that I was hiding my profound disappointment at the absence of her sister-in-law.

"Edward, it's lovely to see you again." Jane smiled apologetically at me. "Isabella sends her regrets, Mrs. Mason. She was feeling unwell and decided to stay at home."

"That's entirely all right, Jane. It's a pleasure for Edward and I to have you." My mother sat Jane down in her "good" parlor and proceeded to dominate the next forty-five minutes of the conversation with talk of my achievements and merits. I was probably crimson with embarrassment by the time my mother made an excuse to leave the room, clearly attempting to give me an opportunity to deepen my relationship with Jane. She shut the door with a meaningful smile for me.

Jane and I exchanged an embarrassed laugh when my mother had left the room and she leaned forward to speak to me, knowing the name I needed to hear.

"I'm sure Isabella is very sad to have missed the opportunity to see you." Jane smiled at me and again I found myself questioning what her motivation was for encouraging my feelings. I questioned it while encouraging it with smiles and questions of my own.

"I hope she is not terribly ill. Perhaps she could come later this week?" Having Isabella under my mother's nose was not my preference but I could hardly invite myself to their place.

"She is not terribly ill. She cut her hand last night on a broken glass, you know how clumsy she is, and she decided to rest it."

"How unfortunate." I worried about Isabella and her clumsiness. She was so delicate and so in need of protection.

"Yes, I'm sure she will be better soon and I will let her know how concerned you are. I'm sure I will be able to convince her to venture out again soon." Jane paused and then spoke somewhat haltingly, as if she weren't sure if she should be saying this. "Isabella needs good friends like you, Edward. I do hope you believe me when I say that. I hope you have _faith_ in that, Edward, no matter what happens." Jane frowned slightly, as if knowing that her words were cryptic to me but not having any way to say it more clearly.

I was about to ask her to clarify what she meant when my mother came back in, ending our talk of Isabella.

Jane left, promising to let me know when Isabella would be free to come to tea. Frustratingly, I waited another week to hear from her and when word did arrive from that family it came not from Jane or Isabella but from Alec.

My father arrived home a week later to tell me that Alec Tremont had invited the two of us to lunch at a club in town that was exclusive to British expatriates in the city. It was quite a thrilling invitation for my father and he was clearly overjoyed at what he perceived to be my social success. I had mixed feelings at seeing Isabella's husband but decided that any connection to her was preferable to the silence I had endured now for almost three weeks.

We met at Caswell's at noon on Friday; Alec was as warm and charming to both my father and myself as usual. Alec was dressed as elegantly as always but there was a fresh bruise on his cheekbone near his eye. When my father inquired about it he said that his tennis partner had struck him with a racket on accident during a particularly spirited volley. They proceeded to discuss matters of mutual business interest and that ubiquitous topic, the Great War. I winced internally to hear them somewhat cavalierly discuss the tremendous casualties and the effect that that would have on the job market and economy in the near future.

"I hope you know, Mr. Mason, that your son is quite a talented young man who should be quite successful in whatever he attempts. I know many people who would jump at the chance to be of benefit to a respectable, intelligent, connected man such as Edward, especially in times such as these." Alec had to know the effect his words were having on my father who could hardly contain himself at receiving flattery from a man of such wealth.

They proceeded to talk of the matters of the day, including the cases of Spanish Flu that had struck the city. My father was concerned that the quarantines and people's fears of infection would hurt business for many merchants.

At the end of our meal Alec turned to me and spoke with a sincere smile; "Edward, I appreciate what a good companion you are being to Isabella and Jane. I will be sure to tell my wife that I was able to see you and that we must have you over again very soon."

I reflected upon Alec Tremont as my father and I took our leave of him. I wanted to hate him. I wanted him to be a monster, a terrible man, a bore; while in reality I found him charming and sincere and really quite likable. It was another conflict to add to my already tormented morals. I had no control over my desire to possess Isabella, as wrong and impossible as it was. I was willing to deceive my parents, defy society and now to conspire against a man who had shown me generosity and friendship from the start.

If there was a monster in this story, it was me.


	11. Chapter 11

"_If I should meet thee _

_After long years,_

_How should I greet thee?_

_With silence and tears."_

_Lord Byron_

_When We Two Parted_

_1808_

**2010**

Isabella lunged towards me, intent upon killing me, but her actions were dictated by rage rather strategy so she was easily caught by Emmett and Jasper.

"Let me go, you bastards!" She spat at the two large vampires holding her captive. "Alice, tell your friends to get their fucking hands off of me!" She was furious and animalistic, as magnificent as I recalled. I couldn't respond, I was frozen in place, looking at the last person I would have expected to see, a woman I thought had died in 1918. How was this possible?

"Bella, we're not going to let you kill Edward. He's part of our family." Alice spoke to her, moving in front of Jasper and Emmett so she could see their captive's face.

_Bella? _I was suddenly jarred back into action by the incongruity of Alice's name for my Isabella. How did they know each other? Where had she been? What were the chances of her having been changed when I was?

"Family! You aren't a family!" Isabella looked around at the people I loved as best she could, jerking her shoulders away from Jasper and Emmett ineffectually. "You're not a family, you're _freaks! _ You're the_ hippies_ of the vampire world, you're hardly even vampires!"

"Bella, you're not being fair." Alice spoke gently to her friend without rancor.

"Bella, if I can..." Carlisle, our father, my mentor, walked towards her carefully, his hands open and extended like he was approaching a wild animal.

"Alice, tell your _father _to get the hell away from me!" Her anger was clearly waning as Alice's words got in but her words still flew from her mouth.

"Bella, please stop. You're hurting my feelings by attacking my family. And you're going to hurt my husband." Alice maintained her gentle tone with Isabella and moved closer.

A change came over Isabella's face as she looked at Alice. She stopped struggling, looking from Emmett to Jasper.

"One of these…your husband?" Isabella's face looked almost gently at Alice and then from Jasper to Emmett with embarrassment.

"Bella, they'll let you go but you have to promise you aren't going to go after Edward. He's my brother, I love him."

"We'll talk, Bella. If he deserves it Emmett and Jasper will hold him down while you hurt him." Emmett let out a laugh. I shot a look at Alice at this but the smile on her face said that she was aware of how to lighten the mood with Isabella.

Isabella looked at Alice for a long moment.

"You can let her go, Emmett, Jasper. She won't hurt him."

Jasper and Emmett let Isabella go; she straightened her coat and smiled shyly at them.

"Isabella, this is my husband Jasper. Jasper, I've told you of my good friend, Isabella." Alice moved over to Jasper's side as Isabella shook his hand. I noticed that Alice introduced her to everyone as Isabella, only Alice seemed to be able to call her Bella.

And just like that my family was introduced to Isabella Swan as if she had never torn Esme's door off it's hinges and went for my throat. When she came to Carlisle, she ducked her head in embarrassment and then smiled that brilliant smile at him.

"Carlisle, please accept my apologies for my poor manners earlier. I will make every effort to conduct myself with more decorum for the rest of my stay."

Carlisle shook her hand and smiled gently.

"Of course, Isabella. There is, however, the matter of your…diet." Carlisle looked at her apologetically.

"I will not feed in your area, Carlisle. I would not endanger Alice in that way."

She had made the acquaintance of my family smoothly, my eyes on her, without acknowledging me. I became aware of another oddity about Isabella; try as I might I couldn't hear her thoughts. I continued to hang on the outskirts of the room while I watched her, marveling at her bizarre reappearance in my life, struggling with the discomfort I felt.

After niceties had been exchanged I finally felt like I had waited long enough and I took a step towards where Alice and Isabella stood. Alice shot a look at me immediately, warning me off. I stayed where I was until everyone but Alice, Jasper and Isabella had left. Finally, Alice turned to me from where she was sitting on the couch with Isabella and Jasper.

"Bella and I will talk, OK, Edward?" _Talking to her right now will not go well. _Alice opened her thoughts to me for the first time in days. I saw a vision of Isabella becoming enraged again in Alice's head.

"I want…" my words trailed off. I wanted to know why she wanted to hurt me, I wanted to know how she came to be changed, and I wanted to know why I couldn't hear her. Furious with myself, and despite reliving the way she had destroyed me all those years ago I _still_ wanted her. After 90 years the only woman who had ever brought me to my knees was returned to me.


	12. Chapter 12

"_Is it perfume from a dress _

_That makes me so digress? _

_Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl. _

_And should I then presume? _

_And how should I begin?"_

_T.S. Eliot_

_The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock_

_1917_

**1918**

I was invited to the Tremont home for another party within days. I wondered what had changed, why it had taken so many weeks for me to be invited back into her orbit but I would hardly refuse. I decided that I would play whatever advantage I needed to while I had the opportunity. I knew she found me handsome, I knew that Jane encouraged our relationship on some level and I knew that she would be impressed if I played the jazz songs I'd been practicing for her. I strategized like a general as to how to conduct myself to best capitalize on these points.

I dressed carefully and made my way to the Tremont's home on the evening of their party. As before, the house was lit up and filled with revelers. I changed my tactic this time and sought out Jane first. I found her getting drinks for a couple of soldiers; she lit up when she saw me.

"Edward, it's so good to see you again." Jane offered me a drink but I refused. I wanted to be clear-headed for the events of the evening. I pulled her aside so we could speak privately.

"I'm pleased to be here, Jane. I was wondering if you could do me a favor? I want to play something for Isabella and I would love to have some privacy. Can you help me?" I knew that what I was asking was scandalous but I took a risk that Jane would help me anyway.

"I think I can help you." Jane gave me a coy smile. Thankfully, she didn't seem offended by what I was proposing. "There's a upright piano in the game room in the basement. It won't sound as good as the one in the large parlor but no one will disturb you. You'll have to wait until later, though. There's an opera singer who's going to start singing at eight o'clock. After that you should be able to slip away."

"Thank you so much, Jane. I appreciate this."

Just then I saw Alec coming down the hallway. I waved in greeting to him and thanked him for inviting me.

"My pleasure, Edward. Have you seen Isabella yet?"

"No, Alec. I just got here and was speaking with Jane."

"Let's go find her then. She'll be thrilled to see you." Alec escorted me upstairs and he called across the large parlor to her. The seats had been set up for a performance and Isabella was directing people to available seats.

As ever, she took my breath away. She wore a dark blue dress with a gauzy top layer, which revealed strips of her skin at her elbows and collar. She wore glittering combs in her dark hair. I longed to pull them out and let her hair come billowing down.

To my dismay, when Isabella saw me her face flushed with surprise and she shot a look at Alec. Alec's smile didn't waver as he led me over to her.

"Look who I found downstairs, dear." Alec spoke smoothly. Isabella's face regained its composure and she smiled at me.

"How nice to see you, Edward. Can I find you a seat? I believe you know Malcolm from his aunt's house?" Isabella gestured to a young man I did indeed know from a friend of my mother's.

"Isabella, I'm sure Edward would feel more comfortable sitting with you and Jane." Alec took her by the elbow and led her to a seat near the front and urged me into a chair next to her. Jane sat on the other side of me.

"Isabella, I'll get you a drink and you two can catch up." Alec smiled at me and slid away to the bar.

"Isabella, I hope you are well." I spoke softly to her and searched her face for a clue to her odd response. Had she not known I was coming?

There was a pause before she spoke, "I'm well. I…I didn't know that you were coming." She didn't look at me. I could feel how tense she was sitting next to me but I needed to feel that electricity between us so leaned slightly towards her and brushed her shoulder with mine. She stiffened and inhaled sharply but didn't pull away.

A large woman in an opulent dress walked into the room to a smattering of applause and she stood waiting for the room to quiet down and people to take their seats. When they did she nodded to her accompanist and he began to play. Her voice filled the room and as the eyes of the party goers focused on her I reached out my hand and brushed the back of Isabella's hand with the back of mine gently.

I heard her breathe sharply again and as I looked at her face I saw the faintest hint of tears in her eyes. Was it the music? I didn't touch her again for the hour that the woman sang but I couldn't focus in anything but her closeness. It was like there was a current of electricity between us and I had to dig my nails into my palms to stop myself from touching her again.

The performance ended, as fact that I was only aware of because of the riotous applause around us and I took the opportunity to whisper in Isabella's ear.

"I have something to show you. Downstairs." She looked at me with a mix of fear and excitement in her eyes.

"Come on." I didn't wait for an answer. I pulled on her hand and led her out of the room and downstairs. I looked for Alec but he was nowhere to be seen. I made eye contact with Jane and she gave me an imperceptible nod.

Bella and I went downstairs to the game room. The room was a bit stuffy from being closed up and the piano was indeed not as fine as the one upstairs but I was thrilled at the privacy. I seated Isabella in a chair near the piano, she had been so quiet this whole time and she looked at me with big, frightened brown eyes like a fawn.

I gave her a smile and began to play "St. Louis Blues". I watched the expression of surprise on her face as I moved my fingers across the keys. It wasn't the same as hearing a whole band play, she was probably accustomed to hearing horns and perhaps banjos accompany the piano and I had only been playing for a few weeks in this style. What I did have in my favor was that I put everything into this song, every bit of passion and apprehension and longing went into the song, all of it directed at the quiet creature sitting before me.

I finished playing and looked at her expectantly. Seeing the tenderness on her face I took a risk. I turned in the stool I sat in so that I was facing her and I spoke softly.

"Isabella, I think you know how I…" I only got that far before she cut me off.

"Edward, I…" her voice broke off as she looked at me sadly. Then she seemed to come to a decision and got up and walked towards me. She stopped in front of me and put her hands on either side of my face and looked at me with tears starting to form in her eyes.

"I want you to remember this, only this." With that she lowered her face to mine and kissed me gently on the lips. She moved her lips against mine softly. I began to reciprocate hesitantly, afraid to move too much and drive her away. She broke off the kiss long enough to whisper, "only remember this." And returned her soft lips to mine with just a little bit more pressure. She tasted like sugar and champagne and tears. I brought my hands up involuntarily but stopped myself before they touched her, wanting her to show me what she wanted. Our mouths were still closed and she took my lower lip gently between hers. I moaned quietly, unable to stand not deepening the kiss or touching her any longer.

At that moment she pulled away from me and took a step back. I could still feel the wetness of her tears on my face and lips. She took a deep breath and looked at the ground for a moment before looking at me again.

"I want you to leave." Her hands shook.

"Isabella, I…" She cut me off again.

"I want you to leave and never come back, Edward. I never want to see you again." She had stopped crying and looked at me fiercely. "You can find the way out I'm sure. I'll make your apologies to Jane." She left the room swiftly and I sat there frozen in remorse.

I had made a huge mistake. I had clearly offended Isabella and would need to find a way to beg her forgiveness. I had been unforgivably forward and intimate with a married woman and she probably thought I failed to consider her with less than proper respect. But then why had she kissed me? I was confused, remorseful while also ecstatic. She had kissed me. My plan had failed but it was obvious that she had some feelings for me but was conflicted about what to do.

I decided to respect her wishes and leave while already planning my next move as I walked back to the ground floor. As I passed the pantry, however, I heard a sound like rustling and wondered whether she had sought refuge her to compose herself. I pushed open the door, hoping to have a chance to apologize immediately.

The pantry was dimly lit by a lamp in the corner. I was surprised to see the room occupied not by Bella but by two men. Alec Tremont was standing in the pantry with a young man. Alec was fully dressed but the boy's vest and jacket were slung over a chair and his shirt was unbuttoned. Alec stood directly behind him and had one hand running across the boy's chest while the other was buried in his hair, holding his head at an angle while Alec's mouth pressed against the boys neck.

Their eyes were both closed when I entered the room but Alec's slid open and regarded me calmly while he slowly pulled his mouth away from the boy's neck.

"Edward…" Alec spoke smoothly, as if there were an easy explanation to what I was looking at.

"I…pardon me," I stammered and turned and ran from the room, shocked by what I had seen.

I ran from the house, horrified, perplexed and perversely filled with hope by what I had seen and done tonight.


	13. Chapter 13

"_All alone, or in two's, _

_The ones who really love you _

_Walk up and down outside the wall. _

_Some hand in hand _

_And some gathered together in bands. _

_The bleeding hearts and artists _

_Make their stand. _

_And when they've given you their all _

_Some stagger and fall, after all it's not easy _

_Banging your heart against some mad bugger's wall."_

_Outside The Wall_

_Pink Floyd's The Wall_

_1979_

**2010**

I stormed up to my room, furious, anxious and questioning. I avoided Emmett and Rosalie's curious stares; they knew little of my life as a human and I would prefer not to share this particular episode with them. They were understandably intrigued by Isabella's role in my life, they had never known me to inspire such powerful emotions in a woman as to make her want to eviscerate me.

Alice finally came up to my room after a few hours. My attempts to spy on her conversation with Isabella were futile; they spoke merely of the present and made the arrangements necessary for her to stay a few days. By the time Alice knocked on my door I was crawling the walls trying to contain my emotions and questions.

"Edward, I'm not going to tell you Bella's story." Alice took a seat on the edge of my couch. I continued to pace. "It's not mine to tell and I don't even really know most of it. I will tell you how I know her and I will try to help you resolve this." As Alice said "this" she spread her hands out to indicate me and presumably wherever Isabella was downstairs.

"Do you want to start by telling me why you didn't mention that we had a mutual acquaintance?" I stopped my pacing long enough to glare at Alice and pull on my hair in frustration.

"I had no idea that you knew her until I saw visions of her coming to visit a week ago. She never talked about her past or how she was changed very much at all." Alice looked at me earnestly and I knew that she was telling the truth. I sat down and tried to calm myself to hear her story.

"Let me tell you what I know and then I'll do what I can to help you."

I took a deep breath to try to calm myself and nodded to Alice.

"Remember, Edward, I was abandoned by my creator. I remembered almost nothing of my human life and I awoke as a vampire having visions of the future, sometimes conflicting visions. It was a terribly confusing time for me. I roamed around feeding on whomever I could find, without much discretion as to whether I was exposing myself to danger or not. Bella approached me one night in a juke joint in Alabama, Bella loves…"

"Bella loves jazz, I know," I interjected and Alice looked at me with surprise.

"Yeah, so Bella loves jazz and those backwoods places are a great way to find people who nobody is going to miss. That's something she taught me, actually. She was the first of our kind to help me. I had encountered a few other vampires before her but they always tried to either attack me or control me. Bella helped me, she treated me like a sister."

"Like Jane." I hardly realized that I had spoken out loud but Alice looked at me with surprise.

"Like who?"

"Isabella had a sister-in-law named Jane. They were close." It felt strange talking about Isabella after all these years. I wasn't sure if it was a pleasant or unpleasant feeling.

"I knew that she had been married but I don't remember her mentioning a sister-in-law." Alice had a slight frown.

"Continue, Alice, please."

"Bella showed me how to stay safe, where and when to hunt, how long we could go without feeding, how we could be hurt, everything I needed to know. We travelled together for about five years and she protected me. I love her like a sister and I was heartbroken when we parted."

"Why did you split up?"

"My gift drove Bella crazy. I didn't have a good understanding or control of it then and I would just share with her whatever I saw. Bella felt…controlled by it. Like she had no free will. She's…volatile, angry. She makes decisions and then changes her mind. I think that she might have also been afraid that I could see…I don't know, there was stuff she didn't want me to know about her, like her sister-in-law, clearly, and I think that she was afraid I could see that too. I think that she was also afraid that she would hurt me somehow. She was sad to leave me but I know that she thought that she was protecting me."

"Why did she come visit now, then?"

"I don't know, she didn't say. When she made the decision I saw her here but I have no idea why she showed up after all this time. I'm glad she came but I don't know…I don't know what's going to happen." Alice looked at me anxiously, clearly wanting to ask about Isabella and I but afraid to upset me. I wanted to talk to her too, but didn't trust myself to open up about it yet. After all, I had kept this to myself for almost a century.

"I…can't say much about it yet, Alice. It's been too long and it's a…complicated story. I was in love with Isabella and she rejected me in a pretty traumatic way for a teenage boy. And then she died, or so I thought."

Alice looked at me with surprise, tenderness and anxiety all blended into one expression.

"Edward, I know that I tried to get you to leave and that this is hard but I'm glad you stayed. I think that the two of you have things…to say to each other that have waited a long time. I can't see any one future, there's too many paths, but I think that maybe she's mad at you for something…something you didn't do or couldn't control and I think that you could probably get some resolution from her and move on. Maybe find someone?" Alice looked at me hopefully. I knew that she and all my family members thought it strange that I had never found a mate and that they thought I would be happier if I did.

"I don't know, Alice. I certainly have some questions for her."

"That's the other thing, Edward. Don't push her, whatever you do. She'll tell you if she wants to but I definitely see things blowing up if you try to make her talk to you. Promise me that you'll let her control the pace of all of this."

I smiled at Alice bitterly. "Alice, Isabella has always controlled our interactions. I've never been able to do anything but follow her lead."

Alice looked at me curiously; it wasn't like me to allow myself to be blindly led by another, even with Carlisle I had always insisted on hearing the justifications for his decisions. Only Isabella could do this to me.

I walked downstairs the next morning to see Isabella pulling the keys to my Volvo off of the key rack in the kitchen.

"That's my car. Do you need a ride somewhere?" I said, trying to keep my voice as neutral as possible.

"I need to go to the slightly larger Podunk town, what do you call it? Port Angeles?" Isabella didn't look at me. "Carlisle said I could use any car I wanted."

"I need to go to school. You can take Esme's car." She looked at me dismissively.

"School? Oh, right. You go to high school. How fitting. Edward Mason, eternal adolescent." She pulled on her coat.

"Cullen." I said.

"What?"

"Cullen. I go by Cullen now."

"Right. I'll remember that when I'm carving our initials together on that tree." She snorted and buttoned up her coat and then tossed the keys to the Volvo to me. "Take them. I'll take this one." She grabbed the next set of keys.

"Not my Aston…"

_"Edward, Let her take the Aston-Martin." _I heard Alice's voice in my head and knew better than to argue. I sighed and walked out of the house, leaving for school ahead of my siblings so I could stay out of trouble with Isabella. I looked at my Aston-Martin fondly, hoping that I would see it again in the same condition. I reminded myself that it was just a car, that I could replace it.

I didn't need to focus to do well in school, which was a blessing because my thoughts were preoccupied with the drama taking place in my personal life. It was a curious sensation to have events happening in my personal life; my life had been so solitary, so static for so long. I returned home from school as soon as I could but neither my car nor Isabella were back from Port Angeles yet. I thought that some music would calm me and thus was playing Debussy when she returned. I continued to play, waiting to see if she would come to me.

She turned up in the doorway and watched me play for a few moments. When I finally finished the piece and looked up at her I couldn't read the look on her face. She stood in the doorway almost shyly.

"You still play so beautifully." She spoke quietly. I struggled to find words to respond to her so I tried to come up with something neutral.

"Debussy died in 1918, before we met." After the words left my mouth I realized that death and how we met were both topics with potential to set her off. I looked at her face carefully, I could see conflict there but she paused and chose her words carefully.

"I feel like the whole world died in 1918." She spoke quietly, almost to herself. I didn't respond, I waited for her to continue.

"Thank you for letting me borrow your car." Her tone changed quickly and was deliberately light. "I've never driven anything so beautiful." I could see from the look of appreciation that she meant it.

"My pleasure." I said and I started to speak again now that she was being friendly but her face changed again to annoyance, embarrassment.

"But then, we both know how much I always loved expensive things." She spat out the comment, her anger seemed directed more at herself than me and she left the doorway where she had been standing for our whole exchange. I looked at where she had been standing for a while, wishing I could hear her thoughts.

An hour passed in the house quietly and I began to feel restless. I found Jasper and asked him if he would like to go out to hunt.

"I'm sorry. I have to take Isabella into town to do a few things." I felt a surge of …jealousy?

"Why can't Alice take her?" I knew that this wasn't my business but was powerless to stop myself.

"I guess Alice has to go through Esme's stuff to find stuff that will fit Isabella. She wasn't planning on staying and didn't come prepared."

"What, Alice can't find the right size in the stores? She's not weirdly shaped or anything."

"No, she's shaped pretty nicely, huh?" Jasper smiled at me and I wanted to punch him for looking at Isabella. Which was perverse and irritated me even further.

Jasper laughed at me and spread his hands out in a gesture of appeasement.

"I'm just teasing you, Edward. Alice told me you guys used to be an item and I couldn't resist ribbing you."

"We weren't an item. I was obsessed with her and she toyed with me and then broke my heart." It felt good to be this honest with Jasper about Isabella. "Why can't Alice just buy her some stuff?"

"She won't let Alice spend any money on her."

"Like that's ever stopped Alice."

"Yeah, that's what I thought but Alice actually listens to her. Weird, huh? I gotta go, I'll see you later." Jasper patted me on the shoulder and walked out of the kitchen.

I tracked down Alice rummaging through Rosalie's closet. I sat down on the bed and watched her for a moment, holding up items of clothing and inspecting the seams.

"I don't know, Edward." She finally said to me.

"I didn't say anything."

"You didn't need to. You want to know how long she's going to stay and if she's ever going to talk about what happened to her. I can't see that with any certainty. All I know is that she promised me she would stay for a week and that she has been talking to Carlisle about some things. Beyond that I can't tell you anything."

"Thank you, Alice. That helps." I got up and walked out.

"Carlisle won't tell you anything. He's going to cite doctor-patient confidentiality,"

I groaned. "Thanks. That saved me some time." She smiled at me and I made my way downstairs to go out and hunt alone. I ground my teeth in frustration at how powerless I was to understand this woman. I was used to wishing I could shut people out, now I was starving for information and could get nothing.


	14. Chapter 14

"_From hell's heart I stab at thee;_

_for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee."_

_Herman Melville_

_Moby-Dick_

_1851_

**2010**

I was spared the last day at school before spring break by the arrival of an unusually sunny April morning. I walked into the den mid-morning to find my entire family sitting quietly in the same room. Carlisle and Esme were reading on the couch, Rosalie had spread newspapers over a coffee table and was rebuilding an alternator, Emmett handed her tools while reading electronics catalogues with Jasper. Alice was performing alterations on some of Esme's and Rosalie's clothes for Isabella and she had insisted on her staying put so she could take measurements. Isabella read a book in between scowling at Alice. She was clearly uncomfortable with the coziness of the setting. She watched me walk in and raised an eyebrow at me archly.

"What are the teenage girls of Forks going to do without you for a week, Edward? Surely you're speeding up the pulses of a couple little girls these days?"

"Are you asking if he's available, Bella?" Alice smiled at her friend. I was positive that only Alice could get away with that remark.

"Edward?" Emmett laughed. "Edward never does that. You know, dating and girls and stuff. " He grinned at me. Bastard.

"Never?" Isabella looked shocked but she wouldn't make eye contact with me. I was furious with Emmett, it was one thing to have teased me continuously for the last seventy years, it was quite another to tell Isabella. I scowled at Emmett but he was busy elbowing Rosalie.

"Isabella, a woman called for you last night while you and Jasper were in town. I left her number next to the phone" Esme spoke, looking up at her.

"Why don't you get a cell phone? Phones have gotten smaller since the 1920's." Emmett grinned at her.

"Can't afford it." Isabella didn't look up from her book.

"You ought to have Alice give you some stock tips. She's great at that."

"I had a lot of money once." Isabella finally looked up at him. "I wasn't happy."

"It might have been the company you kept." I couldn't resist saying something to get her attention; she had refused to look at me since Emmett told her I lived like a monk.

"I seem to remember _you_ keeping me company on my husband's couch." Isabella shot back at me and then a look of embarrassment washed over her face as she realized that she'd said more than she wanted. She got up and stalked out of the room. Emmett and Rosalie looked at me with shock. I smirked inwardly and shrugged my shoulders at them.

I got up and followed her into the kitchen. She was on the phone, facing away from me. I took the opportunity to watch her twirling her hair around her finger and rubbing her calves together languidly. I was somewhat disturbed by the effect she had on me. I was experiencing that rare sensation for me; sexual arousal. Why only her? Why was the only woman who could get this response out of me a woman who tried to rip my head off two days ago and broke my heart as a mortal?

"I'm trying to do that." She spoke softly into the phone followed by a pause.

"Yeah, he's here….no, why would I tell_ him_ about it? Isn't that what you're for?" She listened for a minute after that. "I'll think about it. I don't know. He hates me." She turned around and saw me. "I have to go. I'll see you tonight." She hung up the phone and glared at me.

"Thank you." I smiled at her.

"For what?" she looked at me incredulously.

"You just ended seventy years of torment at the hands of my brother on the subject of my sexual orientation. Now he thinks I'm a _player_."

She stared at me, trying to smile but her face was sad. She seemed on the point of saying something. After a silence that seemed like it lasted for hours but was probably less than a minute crumbled the paper in her hand and mumbled to herself, "This is fucking ridiculous," and she walked out of the room.

I was curious as to what she would do next. As it turned out she sequestered herself in Carlisle's office with he and Alice for a few hours. Finally, Carlisle came out and found me reorganizing my CD collection in my room.

"Edward, do you have some time to come talk with us?" I looked at him incredulously.

"Yeah, Carlisle. I think I can fit it into my schedule." I followed him to his office. Alice and Isabella sat on the antique leather couch. They were holding hands and Isabella's eyes were cast downward in what looked like embarrassment. She had a battered backpack in front of her. I sat down in a chair across from her and waited anxiously.

"Edward, Isabella has agreed to try to tell you why she tried to, um…"

"Kill me?" I asked archly.

"Edward, that attitude won't help. She's going to try to talk to you and Alice and I have promised that you wouldn't try to pry. Revealing secrets is harder for some people than for others." I snorted and Alice shot me a warning glance.

"Sorry." I said. "I'll do the best I can."

"Go ahead, Isabella."

She looked at Alice hesitantly and then pulled a bundle from the old pack in front of her. It was a small package wrapped in a white shawl or scarf. She unwrapped it to reveal a small book.

"The vampire who changed me had this." I could hear the anger in her voice again and she looked at me with accusation in her burgundy eyes.

It was an old, faded copy of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." I opened the front cover and there, in tiny, feminine script was "Isabella Swan." I hadn't seen this book since I was changed.

"Can you tell me why you would send that monster after me?" Her voice was rising in volume. "Did you really need to have revenge that badly? Did you hate me that much?"


	15. Chapter 15

"_Age cannot Love destroy,_

_But perfidy can blast the flower,"_

_Percy Bysshe Shelley_

_Love's Rose_

_1810_

**2010**

I held the thin book in my hands looking at her name on the inside cover.

"Well?" Isabella demanded. "Are you going to tell me this was a coincidence? I lend you a book and after I turn you down some monster shows up with my book and turns me into this?" Isabella gestured to her eyes.

I had trouble finding words. Finally, I looked at Isabella and said softly, "Isabella, I carried this book with me everywhere, I slept with it under my pillow. I memorized the poem and stared at your name for hours. But I haven't seen it since before Carlisle changed me and I would have never given it away. It was the only thing I had of yours."

"After I…after I showed you what I was, you would have hated me that much. You could have done it in anger, or maybe you told him how much you hated me and he did it for you for a favor."

"Who, Isabella?" Carlisle looked at her with concern. "Who came for you?"

"His name was Laurent. He was from the Caribbean. Didn't you know him?" Isabella's face showed her confusion, her panic.

"Isabella, I have no idea who you mean. I don't know anything about…"

Carlisle cut me off. "I know who you're talking about, Isabella. I might be able to explain what happened."

"Carlisle?" I looked at him in shock. Did Carlisle have something to do with her being changed? I would be horrified if my benevolent father had done something to my Isabella. _My Isabella._ How I could feel the resurgence of all these feelings with all that had happened I found incomprehensible.

Isabella's eyes were glued to Carlisle's face.

"There was a vampire, actually quite a few vampires, who showed up in Chicago around the time I changed you, Edward. Epidemics are great times to hunt humans in big cities; there is so much confusion, lots of bodies. People disappear, post-mortems are slip-shod or non-existent. I was constantly playing host to individuals who didn't share my philosophy."

"Laurent came around for a few days, it was before I changed you, Edward, but I had been staying close to you and your mother for quite a while and he might have been curious. He could have taken your book from your things at the hospital."

"There was a letter." I remembered.

"Where? What kind of letter?" Isabella asked me skeptically.

"There was a letter in the book that I had written to you and never sent. He could have gotten your address off of the letter."

Isabella looked from Carlisle to me and twisted her hands. She looked at Alice with a question on her face.

"Bella, I can't see what happened back then but I trust Carlisle and Edward with my life." Alice spoke to Isabella earnestly.

"Did you ask him about it, Isabella?" I asked. "It seems like that would have answered your questions a long time ago."

"I didn't get a chance to." Isabella responded flatly. "I killed him. I can't talk about this any more." She got up and walked out of the room.

The day clouded over again and Isabella left in the afternoon as she had the day before. She took Emmett's Jeep. I was disappointed that she didn't even ask to use my car. Alice was sneaking around more than usual because of Jasper's birthday the next day. Jasper and Emmett and I went out to hunt together and I could hear Emmett's head bursting with questions and coarse comments for me but he tried to restrain himself.

"So, you and the killer, huh?" Emmett finally said to me, as we were getting ready to return to the house.

"It's not what you think, Emmett. And by the way, it's weird when you think of me like that."

"It's just unexpected that he would think of you like _that_." Jasper interjected. "He's had seventy years of thinking you're not like _that_ and all of a sudden we hear you were a home-wrecker back in 1918."

I scowled at Jasper. "I didn't wreck anyone's home."

"So you think you and Red-Eyes are gonna hook up again?" Emmett was relentless on this topic.

"I don't see ever setting myself up for that again. I took it pretty hard the first time she turned me down. I don't really want to have to feel that again."

"That was evasive," Jasper smiled at me. "Are you saying if she made the offer you'd think about it?"

"I can't trust anything she does. I never could."

Emmett and Jasper thankfully dropped the subject and began to guess about what Alice had planned for Jasper's birthday. Isabella wasn't back when we got back.

I began to wonder what she was doing. Was she driving into Port Angeles or Seattle to hunt? Both would have probably been too close for Carlisle's taste if he found out. She could have moved much faster on foot, she could have probably gotten far enough away to hunt. So why take a car? It gave the impression she was doing something for which she'd have to appear human. I made the decision to check the odometer on the Jeep when she returned and to try harder to get her destination from the night before out of Jasper's head. I felt somewhat guilty about prying but when it came to the safety of my family it was worth it and I knew what Isabella was capable of.

When I got back to the house I made a point of asking Alice if Isabella was back yet. She looked at me curiously before responding, "No, but you knew that, right?"

I searched Jasper's mind and saw a church I recognized as being in Forks as well as the Fork's Veteran's hall. The places he'd taken her to the night before. Why these places? I could go there now…

"Edward, don't do it! She'll tell you when she's ready but driving in there to stalk her will just make her angry." I scowled at Alice and went up to my room to listen to music. I put on a John Coltrane CD but used my headphones so Isabella wouldn't know that I was listening to jazz. I felt like an embarrassed teenager, which I guess I was.

I heard her come back an hour later and I heard a knock on my door within minutes. I opened it and stood in my doorway looking at her expectantly.

She gasped and averted her eyes, taking half a step back. I realized that I had taken off my shirt when I got back and had never replaced it.

"Isabella, I know you've seen a man's chest before," I commented drily.

"Not yours, Edward." I looked at her curiously, her eyes still averted, trying to assess why she was responding like this. I took a step towards her and realized from the slight change in her scent that it was arousal. She was attracted to me sexually. It was a response I sensed in human and vampire females before but for Isabella to feel that way? I was thrilled that I finally had something on her, some small advantage I could press.

"Excuse me, Isabella." I stepped back into my room to put on a shirt. No sense in pushing it too far this soon. "What can I do for you?" I gave her my most dazzling smile; hopefully it would work on her the way it worked on human women.

"I wanted to tell you…I thought about it and I'm going to try to trust you. You know, about the Laurent thing." She still seemed flustered. 'It's very difficult for me to let go of a conviction I've held for all these years, but…I want to believe you and Carlisle." She looked at me, her head still lowered.

I paused before responding. I was tempted to be sarcastic, I was angry at the thought that she wouldn't trust me, I had never been the one who deceived her, but I decided to nod instead, not trusting myself to talk.

"I'll see you later, Edward." She took off quickly down the hallway and I didn't see her for the rest of the night.


	16. Chapter 16

"_I wonder if she's sorry_

_For leavin' what we'd begun_

_There's someone for me somewhere_

_And I still miss someone"_

_I Still Miss Someone_

_Johnny Cash_

_1958_

**2010**

We sat in the living room, decorated beautifully by Alice, celebrating Jasper's human birthday. If it were up to me we would have eschewed this particular ritual long ago, honestly, 110 birthday parties is more than any man deserves, but it pleased Alice and Esme. We sat in around handing Jasper gifts, Isabella forced by Alice to sit on the couch right next to her.

Carlisle and I had found him some Matthew Brady Civil War photographs, which Esme had gotten framed. Emmett and Rosalie had found a classic Harley-Davidson in a junkyard that Jasper had seen in 1950 and still coveted and were talking of the repairs it would need. As the talk quieted down Isabella stepped forward quietly and handed Jasper an envelope.

"It's not much, I'm sorry." She waved her hand lightly. I felt badly for her, we were giving Jasper these expensive gifts and she could hardly compete.

Jasper opened the envelope and looked at the tickets and smiled. "It's perfect, Isabella."

"What? What is it?" Emmett looked eagerly at Isabella.

"It's tickets to see this bluegrass band, just local musicians, in Port Angeles tonight." As Isabella spoke Alice's smile was so big it was bursting off her face.

"I know, isn't it perfect?" Alice interjected as soon as Isabella had quit speaking. "I got tickets for the rest of us to go, too!" She pulled an envelope out of her pocket.

"Alice! That's so rude!" The words came out of my mouth before I could stop myself, I was angry at her for overshadowing Isabella's gift with hers. Isabella looked embarrassed.

"Bella, I'm so sorry, I just saw you getting the tickets and then I saw us all going and I was so excited about us doing something together." Alice looked guilty as the flow of words came from her mouth. Jasper stroked the back of her neck lightly.

"It's alright, Alice. I'm not upset." Isabella smiled at Alice but she still looked uncomfortable.

Alice dragged Isabella upstairs to get her ready for the outing. I looked at the rest of my family. Carlisle and Esme looked at me tenderly.

"I think it's nice of you to feel so protective of Isabella, Edward," Esme spoke warmly.

I had nothing to say to that, Esme _would_ see a tender relationship in my every interaction with Isabella.

"It doesn't make any sense to me that she makes such a big deal about our money. Who wants to be immortal and listen to that crappy CD player she has?" Emmett was genuinely confused. One of the things I appreciated about Emmett was that he was so pure and uncomplicated; he just couldn't see why others had to make things so hard on themselves.

"I understand it." We all looked at Rosalie in surprise, I hadn't even been aware of Rosalie acknowledging Isabella's presence here, I was shocked to see her interpreting her emotions. "Everything I had came from the men I was with, too. It makes you feel like…like you can't do anything on your own."

"Anyway, she was more fun when she was being rude to you and trying to kill you." Emmett complained to me. "She's all boring and quiet now."

"Emmett!" Esme exclaimed. "Be kind to Edward's friend."

"She's not my friend, Esme." I gave her a smile to try to take the sting out of my words and went upstairs to get ready. I thought about the conversation from downstairs. Isabella didn't seem angry with me anymore but she was clearly unhappy and she seemed viscerally uncomfortable being with my family and me. Especially me.

She had promised that she would stay for a week; she had three days left and then what? Would she just disappear? If she stuck around how would she feed? Did I want her to stay? I knew that I was angry with her but she also evoked responses in me that I had never felt for anyone else. But I could never trust her.

I finished dressing, still confused about what I wanted. I noted that I had chosen my clothes with special care, with attention to my appearance. As ambivalent as I felt about my feelings I was darkly thrilled about the physical affect I knew I had had on Isabella the night before. It was a small way of getting revenge but I was willing to exploit it.

Isabella had already arranged to ride with Esme and Carlisle when I got downstairs so I missed my chance to get her in my car alone. I settled for riding with them, as much as I hated not driving. Carlisle insisted I ride in the front with him while Esme and Isabella rode in the back. He saw the scowl I gave him but didn't respond. Alice had clothed Isabella in a dress I'm sure I had seen Rosalie wear; a sleeveless grey silk dress that came to just above her knees. I tried not to gape at her pale, bare legs and arms although it was as much as I'd ever seen of her body since that night in her sitting room. She pulled a sweater over her arms and as soon as she was seated in the car she pulled the dress as far down over her knees as she could.

At the small community center she again managed to sit as far away from me as possible. I continually shot glances at her as the music began. It was a surprisingly good performance and I was amused especially by Emmett's enjoyment of the concert. I was reminded that we had found him in the heart of the Appalachians and that he had probably been raised on this music.

I found my opportunity to get close to Isabella during the intermission. I found her standing in the corner of the small lobby by herself while my family spoke to the musicians. I approached her from the side, attempting to get her into a corner where she couldn't escape easily.

"Isabella," I said, placing a hand a fraction of an inch away from her lower back, not touching her but close enough that she knew it was there. "Are you enjoying the concert?"

She looked at me, biting her lip nervously. "Yes, I enjoy this music." She responded. "Especially it's sadness, the sense of fatality. There's a real beauty to how bluegrass acknowledges that life is difficult and sometimes cruel but there's real joy in parts of it." I was struck by her response; it made me I remember how intelligent and open she was when it came to music and poetry. It was a stark contrast to how secretive and dishonest she was about her real feelings.

I was about to respond when I sensed a human getting closer and heard someone unfamiliar call her name.

"Isabella!" I looked up to see one of the musicians approach us. He was middle-aged man, dressed casually in khakis and a polo shirt, with a friendly, bearded face.

"I am so glad you decided to come!" As he spoke the man kept coming closer and to my surprise Isabella smiled genuinely at him and reached out to touch his arm.

"I'm grateful you told me about it, Terry. You guys sound great. It was a perfect birthday gift for my friend." Isabella was so warm and comfortable with this man I was struck by my jealousy and suspicion. I had never seen her this relaxed. Was she in a relationship with a human man? Did that explain her absences from the house?

"I'm Terry." He introduced himself to me. "Isabella and I…" he paused and looked at Isabella, I saw her nod her head "no" imperceptibly. I almost growled at him. "We have a mutual friend." I searched his mind for answers; I didn't see any intimate images or thoughts about Isabella in his mind.

"Terry, this is Edward." Isabella introduced us. Terry's eye took me in curiously, _"I wonder if that's him? He's very handsome but he seems young." _I saw an image of a folding chair and then a bottle of alcohol.

"A pleasure to meet you, Terry." I gave him a smile, convinced that he and Isabella weren't intimate and curious that Isabella may have talked about me.

Isabella looked at me suspiciously and said, "We should get back to our seats. I'll see you this week, Terry." We walked away from him and since many of the seats were still empty I had the opportunity to sit next to Isabella this time.

"Look, if you want answers, Edward, rummage through my head, but leave him alone, he's innocent." Isabella looked at me sternly.

"I can't read your mind, Isabella."

"Bullshit, I know you can read minds." She looked angry.

"I can read minds, just not yours." She looked at me suspiciously but then a look of relief came over her face.

"Well, what's in most people's minds?" She seemed more relaxed with me now. "Sex? Money?" I nodded to her.

"That's all that's up here, too." She tapped her head and looked away from me. The performance began again so I had no opportunity to respond.


	17. Chapter 17

"_I went down to St. James Infirmary_

_To see my baby there,_

_She was lyin' on a long white table,_

_So sweet, so cool, so fair."_

_St James Infirmary Blues_

_Traditional_

_18__th__ Century_

**2010**

We drove back home from Port Angeles the same way we had come, Esme sitting in the back with Isabella who refused to make eye contact with me. When we got into the house Isabella started to go upstairs but I reached out a hand and grabbed her by the wrist.

It was the first time I had touched her since 1918 and I felt the spark that ran through me at the touch of her skin. Ninety years and being transformed into a vampire hadn't diminished the effect she had on me.

She gasped and pulled her hand away. She looked at her hand and then me.

"What was that?" she asked. I looked at her in surprise.

"You don't remember?" I asked. Her look told me that she had no idea what I was talking about. "Isabella, that always happened when we touched, to me, at least." I was amazed that she hadn't felt it.

She looked at me sadly. "I was…" she looked away. "I was drunk."

"I know how you drank at those parties and that last night you were, well, really drunk. But…

She cut me off. "No, every time." She looked ashamed. "I was drinking every time we saw each other, I drank every day then. Being changed was the only thing that stopped it." She struggled to make eye contact with me but managed to do it. She looked heartbroken.

"Edward," she spoke sadly. "It was…real, wasn't it?" She looked at me with dread mixed with regret.

"What was real?" I didn't understand, I didn't know this Isabella. Everything I thought, all those experiences had to be reconsidered.

"What we felt, it was real, wasn't it? I had no idea, I thought I made it up." She walked out of the room and I was too stunned to follow.

The next morning Isabella left the house, I assumed that she was taking a trip into town as she had done each day that she's been with us. But then I realized that she'd left on foot. She hadn't returned by late that night and Alice was avoiding my inquisitive looks.

"She's gone, isn't she?" I cornered her in her room. Alice looked at me, trying to decide.

"I see two things, Edward. I see her gone, vanishing from where I can see her. And I also see her coming back, soon. I don't know which one will happen, she keeps changing her mind. The question is, what do you want? What are you going to do if she comes back?"

"I…I want her, I've never wanted anyone else. And I can't trust her. Ever again."

Jasper walked into the room, I noticed that his face seemed more relaxed than it had in days. I searched his mind for the answer: _Isabella_. He saw my comprehension and smiled sadly.

"She was a mess to absorb. I've never felt so much anger and self-loathing in one body, human or vampire, in my life." Jasper put his hand around his wife's shoulder to comfort her.

We remained on edge for another two days; I looked at Alice every few hours to see what she saw, she shrugged her shoulders at me. Then, on the evening of the third day Alice burst into the library where I was playing my piano with a sheet of paper.

"She's coming back. She'll be here tomorrow. You have to play this!" She thrust the paper into my hand. I looked at it and then her with incredulity.

"I…I'm not sure I can do this, Alice. I'm not sure that I mean this. You don't know what this will say to her."

"I don't know what kind of weird code you two have, no. I do know that if you play this, things will get better. You're not going to be _together_, but she'll feel…like you care about what happens to her, like you don't hate her."

"I'll try." And I set to practicing something I hadn't done in ninety years.

When Isabella walked in the door the next morning she looked dirty and _hungry. _Her eyes were black and they had dark circles underneath them. She hadn't fed. Alice hugged her and brought her to the library. I sat at the piano and I began to play when I heard her coming up the stairs. She stood in the doorway as I began singing:

"_I went down to St. James Infirmary_

_To see my baby there,_

_She was lyin' on a long white table,_

_So sweet, so cool, so fair._

_Went up to see the doctor,_

_"She's very low," he said;_

_Went back to see my baby_

_Good God! She's lying there dead."_

Alice sat her down on a chair next to the piano. She looked at me, expressionless as I played.

"_I went down to old Joe's barroom,_

_On the corner by the square_

_They were serving the drinks as usual,_

_And the usual crowd was there."_

Alice had slipped out of the room. Isabella's face was taking on expression at a glacial pace. She smiled the smallest of smiles as I did my best to sing the song like a jazz musician and not an immortal, rich, seventeen year-old boy.

"_On my left stood old Joe McKennedy,_

_And his eyes were bloodshot red;_

_He turned to the crowd around him,_

_These are the words he said:_

_Let her go, let her go, God bless her;_

_Wherever she may be_

_She may search the wide world over_

_And never find a better man than me"_

As I had before, I did my best to improvise the melody of the song, and infuse the song with everything I did feel, whatever that was.

"_Oh, when I die, please bury me_

_In my ten dollar Stetson hat;_

_Put a twenty-dollar gold piece on my watch chain_

_So my friends'll know I died standin' pat._

_Get six gamblers to carry my coffin_

_Six chorus girls to sing me a song_

_Put a twenty-piece jazz band on my tail gate_

_To raise Hell as we go along_

_Now that's the end of my story_

_Let's have another round of booze_

_And if anyone should ask you just tell them_

_I've got the St. James Infirmary blues"_

I finished the song with a flourish and looked at Isabella, still frozen in place but now with the most peaceful expression I'd seem on her face, well, ever.

"This doesn't mean that I forgive you." As soon as I said it I wished I hadn't, but Isabella just smiled at me.

"I do want you to be happier, though. I am willing to help with that if I can."

Isabella continued to look at me with a smile and finally she spoke.

"I appreciate that. I think that you and your family can help me, as creepy as I think you are with your animals and high school and stuff."

"Good." I didn't know what else to say, I checked what I was feeling and I felt…good? Good that I was able to help her, to show compassion for someone who had hurt me.

"Thanks, Edward." She got up to go but turned as she got to the door.

"Oh, one more thing."

"Yes?" I inquired.

"Eddie," she said with a sly smile. "Watching you play jazz is _still_ the hottest thing I've ever seen." With that she turned and left the room.

I cursed internally. So much for having the upper hand.

**a/n: So, since I use a lot of music in this story there's a playlist for this on Playlist(dot)com. The link is on my profile. Enjoy! JuJu**


	18. Chapter 18

"_Had we but world enough, and time, _

_This coyness, Lady, were no crime._

_We would sit down and think which way _

_To walk, and pass our long love's day."_

_To His Coy Mistress_

_Andrew Marvell_

_1650_

**2010**

Isabella left the house with Alice on foot. When I listened for the thoughts of my family all I could hear was them marveling at me playing such uncharacteristic music. And singing, no less! They all grinned at me when I finally braved the living room.

"What did I tell you, dude! Chicks dig a musician!" Emmett smiled broadly at Jasper while Rosalie smirked at him.

"Yeah, too bad you can hardly use a stereo!" she said to him, teasingly.

"Edward, you have been holding out on us." Esme smiled at me. "We didn't even know you could play like that."

"You heard me practice." I said, somewhat embarrassed that such a private moment had become public conversation fodder.

"Yeah, but it was different when you played for her." Carlisle said gently.

"Can we drop it? I just did what Alice said I needed to do to help her."

"Sure, buddy." Emmett picked up his game controller again. "Just let us know when the wedding is."

"Shut up, Emmett."

I waited what seemed like hours for Alice and Isabella to come back. When they finally did, I was surprised to see that Isabella was even dirtier and she had huge amounts of blood on her shirt and twigs and leaves in her hair. I sniffed: _animal blood. Isabella was trying our diet._ I looked at her with curiosity but she seemed embarrassed.

When she realized that my entire family was looking at her expectantly she sighed and spoke. "I would like to apologize again for calling you freaks. I am going to be staying for a while." She met my eye briefly. "It will be easier to do what I need to do if I'm not eating your neighbors."

Alice cleared her throat and looked at Isabella. She rolled her eyes at my sister and then continued.

"I am going to try not to murder humans anymore. I am trying to be…a better person, vampire, whatever." Carlisle chuckled quietly.

"Isabella, you are welcome to stay as long as you want as long as you embrace our diet."

"Thank you, Carlisle, Esme." She nodded to each of them. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go get cleaned up." She ran upstairs, leaving the living room full of surprised faces.

Isabella made it less than twenty-four hours before she blew up again. We were sitting in the family room. Jasper, Alice, Rosalie and Emmett were playing pinochle while she and I read and Carlisle and Esme held hands and talked quietly. She suddenly threw down her book and let out a growl of aggravation.

"God, I can't stand this!" She gestured around the room at the domestic tranquility. "It's like a goddamn Hallmark card in here!"

She started to storm out of the room when Esme spoke up. "Isabella, dear." Isabella stopped; I was surprised to see her respond to Esme's soft entreaty. She looked at my adopted mother's face respectfully.

"Isabella, there's a cottage on the property. If that would give you a bit more privacy you are welcome to stay there."

"It's the honeymoon…" Emmett stopped as he was elbowed by Jasper.

Isabella looked at Esme for a long moment and then to all of our amazement she walked over to Esme and hugged her. "Thank you." She said, looking into Esme's eyes.

"It's nothing, dear. The boys will help you move your things over right now."

Isabella's things took ten minutes to move over to the cottage, she had so little. She seemed relieved to be getting out of the main house and as Jasper and I walked back from getting her settled he clapped me on the back.

"I have to commend you, Edward. You've dealt with it for decades longer than she has. I don't think that I appreciated it until now."

"What are you talking about?"

"She freaked out about all the couples in there. She couldn't stand all the relationship stuff. The feeling I was getting from her was loneliness and envy and…" Jasper paused.

"What?"

"Lust." He grinned at me. "You still gonna be a chicken about that?"

"I'm being smart, Jasper. Smart." We were quiet for the rest of the way back to the house.

Isabella was clearly happier having a place to retreat to. She had to curtail her trips into town for about a month, although she continued to get daily phone calls from mystery humans. She had clearly told whomever she had been meeting that she had gotten quite sick and was recuperating slowly, although I felt that her attempts at sounding sick were somewhat laughable.

I finally solved the mystery a few weeks after we had gone back to school. I was walking by Mr. Hammond, the high school shop teacher, when Isabella's name and face popped into his head. "_I wonder if I should ask him about her?"_ He thought_. "I guess that would violate confidentiality. I hope she hasn't relapsed. It's so hard in early recovery."_

I ran to find her as soon as I got home. She was in Carlisle's office, looking at his books.

"Are you sure you don't want to just read your Big Book?" I asked. She stiffened and turned around slowly.

"What are you talking about?" she said through gritted teeth.

"My high school shop teacher is concerned that you're drinking again. I thought you hadn't had a drink since 1918?" I smiled at her, thrilled I had found out her secret.

She looked at the ground, clearly angry and embarrassed. "I guess it's kind of ridiculous. A vampire going to Alcoholic's Anonymous." She looked at me sheepishly. "And I called you guys freaks," she mumbled.

"I just don't understand, Isabella. Why are you doing it?"

"I told you that I drank all the way up to when I changed. A lot of…people who drink are doing it instead of figuring out how to deal with their problems, they don't know how to cope the way normal people do so they drink instead. Then they hurt the people around them because they're drinking. Like I did." She looked at me.

"So, even if I stopped drinking in 1918, I was still doing everything the same way. I was angry, destructive and unable to be close to anyone, even Alice. I know that all this seems ridiculous but can't you admit that it's been a few weeks since I've threatened you? Don't you think that what I'm doing is helping?"

Isabella looked at me with an emotion I'd never seen in her face before; _insecurity_. Isabella was looking to me for assurance that she was doing well, that I was proud of her. I was astounded.

"Yes. It's clear that what you are doing is helping." She breathed a sigh of relief. "So the phone calls, Mr. Hammond, the guy at the concert?"

"I got a sponsor in Boston before I came here. I can't tell you who I've seen at meetings, it violates the confidentiality of the meeting."

"Fair enough. I'm assuming your sponsor doesn't know…"

"That I should be picking up a ninety year chip? No. She thinks everything…with my marriage, happened 2 years ago. She also doesn't know that I have killed people. I try to be as honest as I can but I obviously can't endanger her, either."

I wanted to ask her how much she had spoken about us but I didn't want to be insulted if it hadn't come up.

"Well, I appreciate your honesty, even if I had to learn it from my shop teacher. I'll keep your confidence.

"Carlisle, Alice and Jasper already know. I guess I can handle getting a little grief from Emmett and Rosalie. I was just worried about telling you."

It made me angry that she kept more from me than anyone else but this was nothing new. It was certainly different than the way-too-much I knew about everyone else in my life.

"Isabella, it makes me angry that I am trying to help you and everyone, including Mr. Hammond, knows more about you than I do. It's infuriating."

"You're right, Edward. I owe you better than that. I want to tell you the truth; it's just very difficult for me. I will try harder." She looked sincere and pained.

"I need that from you, Isabella." I looked at her carefully before making my next request. "I want to go with you to a meeting."

She looked at me for a minute, thinking. "O.K.. When I'm ready to go out around humans I'll take you to a meeting. But Port Angeles would be better, just to protect poor Mr. Hammond and anyone else who knows you. No drunk wants a teenager whose school they work at knowing they have a drinking problem." She smiled at me mirthfully.

Isabella and I took to doing more things together. She would invite me out to the cabin in the evenings, sometimes, just to give me a break from the couples in the house. I had to admit that having her around had made dealing with the three loving couples in my home a little harder. So just hanging out and listening to music or reading at the cabin was a nice break. I talked her into letting me move a nicer stereo out to the cabin for my own benefit. She didn't talk to me any more about the past. I just had to assume that she would eventually.

After about two months she was ready to start going out among humans again. She adjusted faster than a newborn because as a more mature vampire she had been feeding only every couple weeks anyway. We started with short trips into town and soon she was able to go to meetings again.

She asked me to take her to Port Angeles on a Saturday pretty soon after this. There was a rare book shop that she wanted to go to. I was looking around the store when I heard something in the thoughts of the owner that caught my attention: _"A first edition T.S. Eliot, what a find!" _I realized that she was selling her book, _my book. _I desperately wanted that book back, but at the same time I was hurt that she was selling it. Had she no sentimental attachment to it?

We left the store and she asked me to take her by an office building where she had an appointment. While she was inside I called the bookstore, asked if he had a first edition of" The Love Poem of J. Alfred Prufrock" and, ignoring his astonishment at my timing, bought it for twice what he was going to ask. I asked him to mail it to me.

My second, secret order of business was for Emmett's benefit. I bought a cell phone, had them put Isabella on Carlisle's plan and scratched up the new phone a little.

When Isabella came out of her appointment I gave her the phone.

"No, Edward." She shook her head.

"It's Esme's old phone, it cost five dollars to add you to our plan and Emmett's tired of having to go get you at the cabin when people call for you."

She looked at me and I shrugged. "Talk to Emmett. He insisted."

"Alright. Thank you." She looked straight ahead, somewhat annoyed.

"Free long distance."

"Stop!"


	19. Chapter 19

**Here is a rare BPOV. This is one of my favorite chapters. (Even though I don't own it.)**

"_St. Patrick… one of the few saints whose feast day presents the_

_opportunity to get determinedly whacked and make a fool of oneself _

_all under the guise of __acting__ Irish."_

_Charles M. Madigan_

**St. Patrick's Day, 2010**

I sat with Alistair in the lobby of the Imperial in Boston. We had selected it because it was away from the crush of humanity that was taking place outside and yet near enough to keep an eye on the action. The streets were full of intoxicated men and women drinking Irish whiskey and green beer and celebrating their real or borrowed-for-a-day Irish heritage.

"Oh, how I do love a parade!" Alistair exclaimed dryly, as he watched a couple making out right in front of the window of the hotel. The man was edging the woman's short skirt up so it revealed her underwear, she didn't seem to feel the cold, most likely due to her level of intoxication.

"Is that your sort of thing, Alistair? I would have thought you would prefer a nice Irish cop or fireman." I didn't know if Alistair preferred men but I did know that he was old-fashioned enough to be offended when I suggested that he did.

"I like women, Isabella. I'd even get cozy with you if I weren't convinced that you'd eat my head like a preying mantis" We both laughed. Despite trading insults, Alistair and I got along well, mostly because we both were better off alone. We saw each other every decade or so and were able to pick up where we left off.

"What about that one, Ali? He looks like he's destined to die in a bar fight." I gestured towards a particularly drunk man staggering out of a bar across the street. Alistair and I were both in town hoping to pick up the casualties of the raucous celebration. Enough humans died in bar fights and drunken accidents on St Patrick's Day that it was a good day to hunt discreetly.

"Looks like an alcoholic. I hate feeding on alcoholics. They're so angry, impulsive and resentful. Why, that sounds just like you, dear!" He looked at me with faked surprise. I glared at him.

"You know," he continued, "You could go to those meetings they go to, let go of your resentments, admit you're powerless, collect chips, all of that." He grinned at me.

"That's funny," I said, "Alice said the same thing to me one time. I think she might have been serious, though."

"I saw your dear little Alice a year or so back. She seems to have found herself a beau."

"Where was she? Last time I heard she was in New Hampshire."

"She's living in Washington, out on the peninsula, west of Seattle. She's living with Carlisle Cullen." We all knew who Carlisle was; he had been around for centuries and didn't drink human blood.

"She's with Carlisle? So she's hunting animals?"

"She's not _with_ Carlisle. She lives with him and his mate and a couple other vampires. Her mate is a empath of some sort, there's another couple and that broody young man who reads minds."

"I hate that term: "mate". It sounds so clinical."

"Why, Isabella, I had no idea you were such a romantic!"

"I just want Alice to have a real relationship, not a biological imperative. Come on Al, let's go hunt before all the good ones get home safely. And keep your mouth shut, your Limey accent isn't going to win us any fans in Boston tonight."

"You're just worried I'll charm your pants off with my lady-killer accent."

"I was married to an Englishman, Ali. I built up an immunity to your pretty voices."

"What happened to your husband, dearest Isabella?"

"I bit his head off like a preying mantis."


	20. Chapter 20

"_Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, _

_Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?"_

_T.S. Eliot_

_The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock_

_1917_

**1918**

I felt oddly optimistic as I planned my next move on the morning after that fateful party. While it was true that Isabella had rejected me and that she was married what was also apparent was that she had feelings for me, hence the kiss. What gave me hope was the fact that I had discovered her husband in a potential act of pederasty in her home.

I was confident that once I revealed to Isabella the truth of Alec's fundamental unsuitableness as a husband and offered to help her to extricate herself from the attachment she would be grateful to me and, after an appropriate interval, decide to be with me. She clearly already experienced feelings of affection for me but felt understandably constrained by her marriage vows. Once she learned that she had given these promises in good faith to a man who should not have enslaved her so she would be upset but once she had recovered she could transfer these affections to a more suitable candidate, namely myself.

I was rather busy the next two days making arrangements for what would be the most significant conversation of my life. I had to arrange confidential conversations with a lawyer and a banker. I had a conversation with my mother that I found highly uncomfortable. I rehearsed my words, bought a new tie and got a haircut. I read the poem she had given me for the thousandth time and convinced myself that she was sending me a message from that very first conversation.

T.S. Eliot's poem spoke to me of the dangers of not seizing the day, of never daring to tell the woman you loved of your feelings. It spoke of a middle-aged narrator who had never had the courage to do what he wanted. I felt that Isabella was telling me to be bold, for I knew now that I loved her and that we were meant to be together. I would rescue her from the disastrous alliance of her youth and take care of her for the rest of our lives. I was euphoric, confident when I made my way to the Tremont's home that Monday night.

To my distress, the Tremont's butler informed me that they had left town until late Wednesday. I was disappointed but quickly reminded myself that I was preparing for the rest of my life, I could afford to wait a few days.

But when I returned Thursday evening I was told that Isabella was indisposed and I received the same message on Friday at noon. I was beginning to think that Alec Tremont was conspiring to keep me from Isabella for fear I would reveal what I had seen.

I returned to the Tremont's Saturday evening determined to speak to Isabella no matter what. When the ubiquitous butler answered the door he began to make excuses before I had a chance to speak but I was prepared for him.

"I will wait until Mrs. Tremont is available." I stepped past him into the house and made my way to the parlor. I could hear the sound of voices coming from the dining room; they were clearly having a small dinner party. I was being rude but I refused to back down. I waited for about ten minutes before the door opened and Isabella came in, closing the door behind her.

I hadn't seen her since moments after she kissed me a week before and I felt weak in the knees at the sight of her. She wore a red silk dress, which hugged her curves and was cut low to reveal the pale cleavage of her breasts. She looked wildly sensual, with dark lidded eyes and red lips. I was speechless for a moment but pulled myself together, knowing I had to act quickly before her husband arrived or she sent me away again.

"Edward, I told you…" she looked furiously at me.

"Isabella, give me a moment, please." I rushed to her and led her to sit down on the couch, _our couch,_ and I sat next to her, her hands in mine. The familiar electricity flowed between us, further convincing me that we were fated to be together.

"Isabella, there's something I need to tell you and it's going to be hard for you to hear." She tried to interrupt me but I put my hand up to silence her and continued to talk, talking over her objections.

"Your husband, he's deceiving you in the most monstrous way possible. I discovered him in an act of indiscretion that I won't even describe for you. I don't want to taint your glorious innocence with details but I have every assurance that you have every possible ground for an annulment or a divorce. No one would look askance at you for saving yourself from his perversion."

"Edward, I can't…" she tried to interject again, a frown on her beautiful face.

"I know that it must be very daunting for you to imagine but I won't let you do this alone. I can take care of you, Isabella. I want to take care of you. Things will be hard for a few years if my parents disown me but I come into my grandparent's inheritance when I turn twenty and I can work until then. We won't be rich but we'll have enough and we'll have each other." I paused realizing that when I rehearsed this it had seemed more romantic. "I'm doing this backwards, Isabella, forgive me."

I dropped to my knees on the rug in front of her on the couch.

"Isabella, I love you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you and take care of you. I want to marry you, when you're free."

I looked at her face, frozen in surprise and fear. She took a very long time to respond.

"Edward, you don't really know what's going on." She looked down.

"Isabella, you don't need to be ashamed, what Alec does, what he _is_, is not your fault."

"You…you know nothing about me." Her words came out faster now, almost flying from her mouth. She stood up and gestured at me with clenched fists

"I know that this is hard for you, my love, but I can be patient."

"Do you think if you wait long enough that I'll love you like you want me to?" Her words were daggers now and she narrowed her eyes at me. "You're a child, you don't understand. You know nothing!" she said it again, her eyes furious.

"Explain to me, then. Tell me what I need to do."

She looked at me for a long moment, finally making up her mind.

"Not now. Later. Come back in an hour and I'll explain, I'll show you then. I have to get back to my guests." With that she left the room.

I spent an anxious hour pacing the city blocks around her home, rehearsing and discarding more words, more gestures to convince her that she would be better off with me.

I made my way back to her home at the appointed hour and was shown in by one of her maids, a quiet, middle-aged woman who, to my surprise, showed me upstairs to a sitting room I had never been in but I guessed connected to her bedroom.

I stepped into the room to see Isabella lounging on an overstuffed, velvet couch in a Chinese embroidered silk robe. She had a silver flask in her hand and her lush brown hair was loose and falling in waves around her delicate face and down her torso. She wore no shoes but her silk-stockinged feet stuck out of the oversized black and red robe. She looked beautiful, sensual and quite intoxicated, more so than I'd ever seen her.

I had never been more aroused and confused. Was Isabella planning on seducing me? That was clearly what this scene would indicate but where was her husband? Was she trying to exact revenge on him? What was the right thing to do? As fiercely as I desired her I felt that we should wait until she was free and certainly I would prefer to not have her in her husband's house.

These thoughts flew through my head as I stood there in front of her. She slowly turned to acknowledge my presence and she took a deep breath and a big drink from the flask before she rose.

"Edward, I'm sorry." She looked so remorseful although her words were slurred. I thought she was apologizing for turning me down earlier.

"Isabella, it's perfectly alright." I walked to meet her and placed my hands on her elbows lightly, looking down into her face, wanting to comfort her and resisting my urge to kiss her, to caress her.

"Oh, Edward." She looked at me with an expression of pity exaggerated by her drunkenness. "You thought I brought you here to take you to bed." She pulled away from me, nearly losing her balance in the process. She took another drink before continuing to talk. " I brought you here to save you. If you are shocked by what Alec does, what I am will kill you."

"Isabella, you don't have to…" She cut me off.

"Edward, you need to see what I am." Tears had begun to trickle down her face as she dropped her robe. She stood before me in a flimsy silk chemise that stopped high on her thighs, revealing a few inches of her pale skin above her stockings. She took my breath away; I wanted to grab her and run away with her, save her from whatever was about to happen.

She opened up the door to her bedroom and stepped in. I heard her husband's voice say, "Isabella, what took you so long?" Isabella moved further into the room where a man who I could see in the dim light was not Alec embraced her. It was the boy I had seen in the pantry with Alec, dressed in his shirtsleeves.

He wrapped his hands around Isabella's waist and bent his head to kiss her collarbone. He couldn't see me but Isabella's eyes remained fixed on mine in the next room. As she ran her hands up the boy's back I swore I could feel those hands on my own back, imagine it was my lips on her skin. She shuddered, her eyes still burning into me. I was consumed with fury, my world came crashing to a halt, but I couldn't tear my eyes away from her. Finally, someone unseen, it must have been Alec, closed the door and I ran from the room, the house, the street.


	21. Chapter 21

"_At some of these we balked. We thought that we could find an easier, softer way. But we could not. With all earnestness at our command, we beg of you to be fearless and thorough from the very start. Some of us have tried to hold on to our old ideas and the result was nil until we let go absolutely."_

_How it works - Chapter 5 of the Big Book, 4__th__ Edition, _

_Alcoholics Anonymous_

**2010**

Isabella had gotten a job. The mystery appointment was with an independent newspaper who had hired her to write reviews for local concerts and plays. She bought herself a disgusting twenty-five year-old Datsun with the money she got selling "our" book and was able to drive herself to events and her meetings and insisted on paying Esme and Carlisle rent for the cabin.

The nice part was that she would take me to some of the concerts with her. Our relationship was wholly platonic, but it was nice not being the only uncoupled person in a group of partners for the first time in years.

One night right before the end of the school year I saw some students I knew from class. Isabella and I were in a small Port Angeles club to see a very loud rock band she was writing an article about. I saw Ben and Angela before they saw me but since they were some of the few students I actually spoke to occasionally I caught their attention and waved them over to us.

"What are you doing?" Isabella hissed, glaring at me.

"Quiet," I said in her ear. "I want you to meet my friends."

Ben and Angela got to our table and I could tell that they were shocked to see me with a girl who wasn't one of my sisters.

"Ben, Angela, this is Isabella." I introduced them and Isabella smiled broadly at them. _"She's beautiful"_ Ben thought while Angela mused on how happy I looked with Isabella. This last gave me pause. Did I look happy? _Was_ I happy with Isabella?

Ben and Angela made small talk before leaving to sit at their own table together. I smiled at Isabella.

"Thank you, that meant a lot to me."

"I just had no idea you had human friends." Isabella shook her head at me. "You realize that they think we're together?"

"Does that bother you?"

"What, that you have human friends? Of course not, I have human friends."

"No. That they think that we're together."

"No, it doesn't bother me. Although, your being a high school student makes things complicated for me."

"How?"

"I am twenty-one to the people in Forks who know me. It would be illegal for me to be in a relationship with you. And maybe creepy."

"So you're unwilling to go to my graduation dance with me?" I smiled at her. I was oddly thrilled that we were having a conversation about being in a relationship, even in the abstract. I hadn't considered how our made-up ages would affect this, however.

A couple days later Ben asked me in Math class if Isabella was my girlfriend. I told him no but my words weren't convincing and he left thinking, _"Maybe not yet"._

June came and Emmett and Rosalie "graduated" and started planning a trip to Brazil. Jasper and Alice wanted to go to Paris for a couple months before school started again and Esme and Carlisle were talking about joining them for a while. Isabella refused Alice and Jasper's offer to come with them. She cited her job and her lack of funds as her excuse. Normally I would accompany them but I was seriously considering staying home. With Isabella. It took me days of mulling this over to realize that I wanted to stay here because she would be here. We would be alone for the first time, well, ever.

Alice, of course, knew what I was doing. She was packing for Paris, surprisingly light since she would be shopping there. I was helping her make space in her closet by packing up clothes for charity and setting aside things that Isabella could wear. In my defense, she trapped me.

She held up a green sundress. "Do you think that this would look good on Isabella?"

I looked up. "That will look beautiful on her." And then I noticed Alice's smirk. "What?"

"You are so in love with her." Alice smiled at me and then began dancing around with the dress. "You're going to kiss her in this dress. I saw it two days ago."

"But now that you've told me I can give it to the shelter." I teased Alice.

"It doesn't change how you feel, Edward."

"I can't be with Isabella like that, Alice. I can't trust her. Don't you have to be able to trust people you're in relationships with?"

"You're not telling me that you don't love her."

"No, I'm not. She's beautiful and she was the first and only woman I ever loved. Do I love her? Yes. But I can't be with her." Angry and sad about this conversation I left the room. But I didn't change my mind about staying here for the summer.

All it did is make me more conscious of her effect on me. It had been pretty easy to be with her and not think a lot about wanting to be with her, hold her hand, kiss her, and potentially more. But now that I was truthful with myself about how I felt I couldn't not notice that we went out of our way to never touch. That even in the summer she dressed pretty demurely and our conversations were very non-personal.

I decided that we needed to have a conversation about this, at least parts of it. My plan got an unexpected boost in July when she told me her sponsor was coming to visit from Boston.

"She wants to meet you," Isabella said. "I hope that's OK with you."

"I'd be honored." I had read the Big Book and had gone to several meetings with Isabella but she had yet to talk any more with me about what had happened in the past.

"Just one thing," she looked sheepish. "We're going to have to keep the whole high school thing quiet. I've told her about you and…our past and she's is probably assuming that you're, um."

"Older?" I smiled at her, amused by her discomfort.

"Yeah, I'm not in love with lying to Carol but telling her we're vampires seems like a poor alternative."

"Your secret's safe with me, cougar." I grinned at her as she threw a book at me.

Isabella picked up her sponsor at the airport, refusing my offer to drive them but agreeing to take my Volvo because of the length of the drive to Sea-Tac. They returned late and Isabella snuck back to the house to go hunting when Carol had gone to bed.

"So when do I get to meet her?" I asked as we ran into the woods.

"Do you want to come tomorrow morning around ten?" Isabella asked as she got the scent of a deer.

"Sounds good." I answered as I caught up with her minutes later, draining the carcass of a young deer. "You're looking like a natural at that, by the way."

Isabella looked at me and if she could blush I'm sure she would have.

I arrived at ten the next day and was introduced to Carol; a tall, slender woman in her late 40's. She looked at me appraisingly, suspiciously. _He is handsome but so young. I hope she's being careful._

Isabella and I pretended to drink coffee and talked with Carol about Boston and Seattle. She had come out without intending to spend any time in Seattle. She had come for the express purpose of seeing Isabella and making sure she was OK.

Isabella walked me to the door and as the door closed I heard her sponsor say, "One year, Isabella."

"I know, Carol. Trust me, I know."

I asked Isabella about it later. "So what was that 'one year' thing Carol was talking to you about earlier?"

She paused, and then responded, "Nothing important."

"Honesty, Isabella," I teased.

"Okay, here's the deal. You're not supposed to make any major changes in your first year of sobriety. No new jobs, moves, relationships. Carol has been OK with the job because it's part time and she sees how well I'm doing here so the move was OK, but now that she's seen you she is hammering home the relationship thing."

"She thinks I'm irresistible, huh?" I gave Isabella a big smile.

"Yeah, she know that we have history and we're hanging out a lot together so…"

"So when your year's up?" I held my breath and tried to look nonchalant, like we were talking in the abstract again.

"Green light, I guess. Sponsor's seal of approval. She likes you, thinks that you're good for me."

"Hmm." I kept it non-committal. I wanted to ask if that's what she wanted but then I remembered how I had sworn that I wasn't going to trust her in that way again. I had even gotten rid of the green sundress after my conversation with Alice.

It was Carol again who forced my hand for the last part of the conversation. The night before she was to leave I fixed them dinner in the main house (for Carol to eat and Isabella and I to push around on our plates). We were in the kitchen cleaning up when Bella stepped outside to take a call from the newspaper. Carol immediately turned off the water and fixed her gaze on me.

"Edward, I don't like to interfere but Isabella is going to need some…coercion."

"What's up, Carol?" My interest was immediately piqued.

"She needs to tell you her story. Do you know the steps at all?"

"Step 5," I recited. "Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs."

She seemed surprised so I tapped my head. "Photographic memory."

"So, it doesn't have to be you but it would make sense."

"Steps 8 & 9." I said.

"Right, it would help her to make her amends to you."

"She's pretty resistant to talking about it."

"Yes, but she loves you and wants to be with you so I guess you'll just have to give her an ultimatum."

"Are you advocating that I emotionally blackmail your sponsee?" I smiled at her. _Isabella wanted to be with me? Had she told her sponsor this or was Carol just guessing?_

"Yeah, pretty much." She smiled at me as Isabella came back into the room apologizing for the interruption.

Carlisle and Esme came back a week after Carol had left but without the distraction of my siblings Isabella and I still spent a lot of time together. It felt as though things just got more careful between us as the days past. We maintained a respectful distance, were conscious of each other's privacy and avoided conversations about anything having to do with relationships, the past or sex.

I thought I was going to die, again.

Three days before Alice and Jasper were going to return Isabella and I were painting the laundry room for Esme. I found myself watching her, in a pair of old khakis and one of my shirts, taping off the edge of the ceiling. Her hair was in a ponytail and she had lint in it from behind the dryer. She came down the ladder to get some more masking tape and I was there to meet her. My standing so close startled her and she looked at me with wide eyes, now almost completely amber.

I reached out gently and pulled the lint from her hair. She smiled and I stroked a finger down her cheek, feeling that buzz of electricity.

"Isabella," I breathed.

She nodded silently.

"Do you want this?" I gestured between us.

She nodded again. _How long had she known?_

"One year."

She nodded again with a slight smile.

"And you have to tell me everything."

Her smile disappeared.


	22. Chapter 22

"_Turning and turning in the widening gyre _

_The falcon cannot hear the falconer; _

_Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; _

_Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, _

_The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere _

_The ceremony of innocence is drowned;"_

_William Butler Yeats_

_The Second Coming_

_1919_

**1918**

I don't know how I made it home, I don't remember any of that night after I left her. I somehow made it to my home, to my room and I didn't leave it for a full day. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat, I could hardly concentrate on what my mother said to me. Unable to withstand her eyes I took to the streets of Chicago, wandering aimlessly day and night. All I could see was her, remembering her kissing me, rejecting me, holding my hand, being embraced by a stranger, listening to me play the piano, talking with me of poetry, and breaking my heart.

I had made up my mind that I would enlist. Only the adventure and glory of war would distract me from my abject heartbreak. I made my decision and made my way back home to break the news to my mother only to be met by our housekeeper Louisa with tears in her eyes.

"What is it, Louisa? What has happened?" I had the strangest feeling that it had to do with Isabella, that's how consumed by her my thoughts had become.

"It's your father, Edward. He's quite ill and your mother is with him at the hospital. He collapsed at work and they say it may be the flu."

I felt horrible. I had been so consumed by my personal heartache that I had neglected my parents in a moment of crisis. How could I think of abandoning my mother?

I made my way to the hospital where I found my mother in the hallway outside my father's ward. She looked exhausted, devastated but she was clearly comforted by my presence.

"Edward, thank you for coming. I haven't spoken to the doctor yet. It would help me if you were here for that."

"Of course, Mother. Whatever you need." My mother looked at me with concern and I knew that she wanted to ask me where I had been and what I had been struggling with but she knew me well enough to know that I wasn't ready. I didn't know when I'd be ready to talk about what had happened. We sat there together, holding hands, each wrapped up in our own worries.

After a short time a young doctor spoke my mother's name softly and our attention was pulled from our own thoughts. He was a startlingly handsome man with blond hair and unusual amber eyes. He shook hands with us. His hands were cold.

"Mrs. Mason, Edward, I'm Dr. Cullen. I've been examining Mr. Mason. I'm afraid he is going to need to be put in quarantine as he is showing symptoms of the flu. But we will care for him as best we can."

"Thank you, Dr. Cullen. I appreciate your caring for my father." My mother didn't speak but I could tell from her posture that she was as calmed by his words as I was.

I insisted that my mother go home to try to sleep while I kept our vigil in the hallway. I saw Dr. Cullen many more times during the night and began to wonder when, if ever, he slept. His dedication was commendable as was his remarkable ability to sooth even the most devastated of relatives. My mother arrived back late the next morning but I could see that something was wrong and I rose to meet her. Her face was pale and damp with sweat and as I got closer I could see that she, too was sick.

My mother was placed in the same ward as my father. I remained in the hallway, drifting in and out of sleep. I remember Dr. Cullen bringing me some food at some point. The next thing I remember Dr. Cullen waking me up to tell me that my father had passed away. He stayed with me in my grief for more time than I would have thought the busy doctor could spare.

I pulled Isabella's book out of my pocket. I reread the letter I had never sent her and I indulged myself in a moment of fantasy where she heard of my grieving and came to comfort me. In my mind I asked her to stay and she held my hand and said she would. I dropped my head into her lap and she ran her fingers through my hair. I slept soundly for the first time in days.

Eventually I became aware that I was lying, not on the bench in the hallway, but in a bed in the ward where my father had died, where my mother lay. I did my best to conjure up Isabella in my mind again, I had slept so well with my head in her lap, her hands stroking me. I drifted back to sleep to be awakened by a woman's voice. Had she come back?

"You have to save him, Dr. Cullen. You have to save Edward." Dr Cullen was there; I heard him answer her.

"Of course, we're doing everything we can for him." I heard her again.

"No, you have to do everything y_ou_ can do to save him. I want him to live. You can help him. Please."

I was burning up and the room was blurry. My body was shaking so hard I couldn't lift my head to see if she was really here. My vision went black again as I groaned in frustration.

The next thing I remember feeling was the cool touch of Dr. Cullen on my forehead and then the most excruciating pain I'd ever felt.


	23. Chapter 23

"_And I'll see your Red Label, and I'll raise you one more,_

_And you can pour me a cab, I just can't drink no more,_

_'Cause it don't douse the flames that are started by dames,_

_It ain't like asbestos_

_It don't do nothing but rest us assured,_

_And substantiate the rumors that you've heard"_

_Tom Waits_

_Bad Liver And A Broken Heart (In Lowell)_

_1976_

**2010**

It was the day after Christmas break began in my senior year at Forks High School and Jasper, Alice, Isabella and I were going to Chicago for the holidays. Alice squealed excitedly with Isabella over all of the great holiday shopping they would do. Isabella tried to look excited for my sister's sake. Jasper and I sat in the seats behind them, Jasper trying to relax without breathing the scent of the humans crammed with us into this airplane, while I tried to quell the anxiety I was having at the thought of going back to Chicago for the first time in ninety years.

_"And you have to tell me everything."_

This was the condition I'd given her so that we could be together. I knew that she was terrified about telling me her story. She hadn't spoken for so long once I'd said that to her this summer in Esme's laundry room, standing closer than we'd stood to each other since she kissed me in 1918. She gazed up at me with longing and I'd known, even though I couldn't read her mind, that she wanted me. I wanted her but I needed this, I needed for her to give me everything she'd been withholding.

She'd agreed but asked that we do it like this; wait until we could go to Chicago. That way she could show me. Winter break presented itself as the perfect time, less sun to worry about, two weeks off of school.

The plane landed and as we walked into O'Hare. Jasper breathed a sigh of relief as he and Alice went to go find the car rental counter and Isabella and I found our bags. Isabella had been a hard sell on the hotel but since we had all refused to stay in the rat-trap that she could afford she agreed to accept the expenses of her trip as her Christmas present.

She smiled at me anxiously and I longed to hold her hand, pull her to me to comfort her but we were still keeping our distance. We had agreed this summer while her sponsor was visiting to wait for Isabella to have a year's "sobriety" so we had to be patient until March.

We got to the hotel and checked into our rooms. Isabella had agreed to share a suite with us after we convinced her that it was cheaper than getting her her own room (not true). She looked at me after getting settled in and smiled nervously.

"Tonight?" she said.

"Are you ready?" I asked.

"No, Yes. I don't know but I might be stalling." She smiled. It was refreshing to hear her being so honest about what she was feeling. This was new, just the last few months.

"Tonight." I said.

At dark she signaled that she was ready. We walked out of the hotel and past the taxi stand. When I looked at her inquisitively she said, "What, like you're going to get tired?" I laughed and we walked down to Navy Pier. She found us a bench where we could see the water and, looking away from the lake asked me, "Do you remember what this was like?"

I looked around, trying to summon memories and failing.

"I don't think I ever came down here."

"No, I imagine you didn't." She laughed ruefully. "It was warehouses, docks and bars. A boy like you from a family like yours wouldn't have come down here."

"I was born down here, in a room above a bar. My mother was…a prostitute. She worked the bars down here. My father had been a cop but once he took up with a…with my mother he lost his job. He got work in security down at the docks. She drank, like I did. I don't know if the men or the drinking came first for her. She didn't stick around my dad and I and it broke my dad's heart. He really loved her and it just drove him into the ground."

"She had my little sister when I was four or five. I'm not sure if my dad was the father but I…she was the first person that I ever loved. Sadie." Isabella smiled sadly. "She wasn't right, I guess now you'd say she had a disability or maybe it was fetal alcohol syndrome, but at the time they called it being 'simple', remember?"

I nodded. I wanted to take her hand but didn't want to be distracted by touching her.

"My mother died when I was eight but she had already been dead to us. My father did the best he could but he just loved her so much, he kind of wasted away into the bottle, too. I took care of Sadie. For a while I could leave her with a neighbor while I went to school and then when I dropped out and went to work. But it got harder as she got bigger and older. She would run away from the neighbors and show up at my job. I lost a bunch of jobs because I'd have to leave to go take care of her."

"I met this boy, man, maybe, who said he'd marry me and take care of us. I lost my virginity to him and after he slept with me a few times he enlisted, went to war, just disappeared. I couldn't hold a respectable job because of Sadie, I was starting to think that I'd have to sell myself like my mother."

"One day, after losing another job because I had to go take care of Sadie, she and I were in the park. She was playing, picking flowers, singing, because she was always happy when she was with me. I was crying because I was sure I'd end up a whore like my mother. This woman approached me and started talking to me. She offered to help, she could find me a better job, a better place for Sadie to be during the day and she introduced me to her brother. It was Jane." She stopped and looked at me.

"Alec started courting me. I shocked, but remember thinking how lucky I was. He was such a gentleman. I just didn't realize that it was because he had no interest in women. I didn't find that out until later. He convinced me that Sadie would be better off in a home for children like her. I missed her but she was being taken care of and I thought she might be better off without me."

"Why would you think that?"

"I had already started drinking, not all the time, but I knew that…that I would have more time for drinking if Sadie weren't around. That's how alcoholics think, Edward. The relationships cut into your drinking time." She couldn't even look me in the eye; she was clearly humiliated at what she'd just told me.

She stood up abruptly. "Let's walk." We walked through downtown and the people ducking in and out of bars and restaurants to escape the cold wind. She led me to her old street.

Her home still stood but had been turned into offices. They were empty and dark. We sat down on the curb across the street, facing the house.

"My wedding night," she sighed. "I found out my wedding night the deal I'd made to stay off the streets and to take care of Sadie."

"Alec took me to a resort in Hot Springs, very fancy, only the best people. He made sure I had plenty of champagne with dinner, he walked me around to make sure that I saw the beautiful accommodations and the fine people. And then he said to me, 'You know that you don't really belong in this world, right, Isabella?' I couldn't do anything but agree. Then he told me what he was and what he wanted."

She paused. "Alec liked men. But he didn't want to be with men who looked and acted like they liked men. Do you know what I mean? The scene that you found around theatres and the arts, men in women's clothing or acting flamboyantly. Alec also wanted a cover, a wife to allay suspicion. He could have found someone more socially appropriate but picking someone like me, someone with a poor background, a sister who needed care and someone willing to anesthetize themselves with alcohol, gave him enough control that I would…do what he wanted."

She blew out a deep breath. "This is hard. Can we stop for tonight?"


	24. Chapter 24

**I have never once mentioned my non-ownage of Twilight. So I just did.**

"_I saw pale kings, and princes too, _

_Pale warriors, death pale were they all; _

_They cried—'La belle dame sans merci _

_Hath thee in thrall!'"_

_La Belle Dame Sans Merci_

_John Keats_

_1819_

**1918**

The pain spread through my body from my neck. I thought I had been on fire before but that had been a mere flush. I was delirious; in agony and thought for sure I'd died and gone to hell.

I tried to summon up an image of Isabella; that had worked to soothe me before. I was able to bring her face to my mind but I had no control over the vision. She and I sat on the couch in her husband's house. She was reading me a poem; she was reading me a sonnet. "My mistresses eyes are nothing like the sun." She read and then she looked at me and laughed. "Don't you think Dr. Cullen's eyes are like the sun, Edward? That odd yellow color?" She tossed the book aside, saying, "I hate that one. What about 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci'? Do you want to hear that one, Edward? It's about a beautiful woman who leads men to their death. Do you want to be my pale prince, my love?" She laughed again but this time she was frightening and fierce.

My vision darkened and then I began to hear more voices whose bodies I couldn't see but whose words were benign; talk of weather and dinner plans, money, the attractiveness of a girl, the lateness of the hour. The agony in my body, the burning in my blood began to abate and the voices became one voice, familiar, calm. The voice was saying, "_It should be soon now. I think. I hope I made the right choice."_

After an eternity I opened my eyes and looked around. There was something wrong with my eyes; everything was too bright, too crisp. I was lying in a room I had never seen before, with wood floors and walls. I looked out the window and saw that I was no longer in the city. I could see nothing but trees outside the window. I lay on a small bed covered by a quilt. I heard tapping noises nearby and the sound of birds. I heard a shuffling and the door opened to reveal Dr. Cullen.

_"He looks so confused, poor boy. I hope I made the right choice."_

"Who looks confused?" I asked. Dr. Cullen looked at me curiously.

"What?"

"You said someone looked confused. Who looks confused?"

_ "Is he's still delirious? He looks awake and alert. Was there something mentally wrong with him that I didn't notice before?"_

"Dr. Cullen, I don't know who you're talking about."

"I didn't say anything, Edward."

"I'm sorry, Dr. Cullen, but you did. You asked if he was still delirious and wondered if there was something mentally wrong with someone that you didn't notice. I just don't know who you are talking about."

_"Edward, can you hear me when I say this?"_

"Yes, of course I can. Are you sure you're feeling quite well, Dr. Cullen?"

Dr. Cullen sat down on the edge of the bed where I was now sitting up. He smiled at me. "I think that you should call me Carlisle. We have a great deal to talk about."

Carlisle told me, slowly, patiently, what he had done to me. He told me first that my mother was dead and then he comforted me as I tried to cry, but no tears came. There was something wrong with my body and my mind. I could hear Carlisle, even when he didn't speak out loud, sometimes I could see images from his mind, too, like when he remembered my mother's face as she had begged him to save me.

"I thought that was Isabella." I said, but I could see my mother's face in Carlisle's thoughts so I knew that I had been imagining it.

"Who is Isabella?" Carlisle asked gently.

"A woman I know, I knew. I thought she was there, I don't know why."

Carlisle continued with his tale, he told me how he felt like my mother had known somehow that there was a way he could help me, although she couldn't have possibly known what he was.

"Which is…?" I saw the word in his head; _"Vampire." _

"Vampire?" I said, catching him off guard again. He laughed.

"I guess that it will take me a while to get used to that again. I lived with another one of our kind who could do the same thing that you can do but he had to touch me first. You don't have to touch me."

"Another of our kind?" Carlisle smiled at me hesitantly.

"Edward, you were dying. I made you like me, a vampire. Let me show you."

Carlisle showed me. He showed me how strong and how fast I was, he showed me how I could hear and smell things that would have been imperceptible to a human. He taught me how to hunt, how my body needed blood but not sleep, medicine, rest, food or drink. He told me that there were others like us but most of them fed on human blood. He told me his story, how he had never fed on humans, how he lived among them and worked as a doctor, how many of our kind thought of ourselves as monsters but that he thought we still had souls, although we would never die.

"Never?" I asked him. My mind couldn't contain this thought, how could my parents be gone forever but I would never die?

"Not unless we are killed in a very deliberate way. It's very difficult." Carlisle told me what was dangerous to us, how to escape detection, how to pass as human, he told me that he had brought me to this remote cabin in Northern Illinois because I would need to stay away from humans for a few years until I was stronger.

"A few years! That's impossible. I need…" I asked myself what I needed. I wanted to see Isabella; I needed to see her. Why? Nothing had changed, she had not pleaded for my life, she hadn't held my head in her lap. "Never mind." I said to Carlisle and I dropped my head.

As Carlisle revealed my new life to me I wanted to be angry with him, I wanted to hate the man who had done this to me. But to hate Carlisle was to hate goodness, was to hate compassion, for he was these thing personified. He was so selfless and kind that I knew that he had truly done what he thought best and not without a great deal of internal conflict. I knew, for I could hear the struggle in his head.

He felt selfish, for my joining him ended his centuries of loneliness, but he had changed me because he had truly felt that he was satisfying the earnest wish of a dying woman who thought of nothing but her love for her son.

I would perhaps have hated a lesser man, would have cursed him for damning me to this existence, but because he was Carlisle, the finest man I had ever known I loved him like a father, in a way that I had never loved my human father, and we formed a tiny family of two.


	25. Chapter 25

**1965 **

No self-respecting vegetarian vampire comes to the French Riviera in the middle of summer. It's a logistical nightmare what with the sun and the crowds and the lack of appetizing animal choices. You have to go miles just to get to a cow or a sheep, which, in truth, do not count as "appetizing animal choices". Nevertheless, Carlisle and I were here in Juan-les-Pins in July. At a jazz festival no less. An enormous jazz festival. I don't even really like listening to jazz, I don't think.

I was here because Carlisle dragged me down here. Esme, Alice and Rosalie were shopping in Paris. Jasper was too likely to eat a sunbather and had been exiled to Switzerland with Emmett. John Coltrane was going to perform "A Love Supreme" in public for the first time and Carlisle refused to miss it. He reasoned that it would be safer for two of us to go together, especially since I could read minds and could tell if we were in danger of being discovered.

But how do you escape detection if your skin sparkles in the sun and you're in this incredibly crowded place in the summer? Where humans go to sunbathe. Topless. Staying out of the sun is definitely going to make us look, well, odd.

We found a small cabana bar where Carlisle could hang out for the day and enjoy the music. I stayed in our room, which was close enough to the beach to hear if there were any suspicious thoughts about the sparkly blonde man. I also had the dubious pleasure of hearing the performances. Be-bop and so-called "free jazz" was the predominant style here.

I had a complicated relationship with jazz. I loved and hated jazz. It was exciting and alive and passionate and experimental. In short, everything I was not. I had loved the woman who introduced me to jazz in the 1910's and she had broken my heart. I wondered how Isabella would feel about the jazz of the 1950's and 60's. It was so different from what was now called "traditional" jazz, the music she had played for me, the music I had learned to play for her on the piano. The music I had played for her before she kissed me and then sent me away.

Isabella. How could I escape her? Dead for forty-seven years, the only woman I had ever loved. I shook my head as if I could shake her out of my thoughts and turned my attention back to the festival. I found Carlisle's thoughts, listening to the band that was playing. Carlisle, who loved humanity, happy to be surrounded by it and it's musical passing fancies. I scanned the thoughts of those around him, looking for anything amiss. A few women thought him handsome, a few men, too. There was so much sex here, I was glad that I was in the seclusion of the hotel room rather than out among the scantily clad Germans, Dutch, Brits and Americans. Not to mention the French, local and imported, who resented the presence of the others. More discreet among them were the Algerians and Moroccans who covered up in their long caftans and pants and rejected the drunken revelry but loved the music nonetheless.

I saw an image flicker through the minds of several concertgoers. A dark-haired woman, in the floaty caftan of the North Africans but pale-skinned like a European. She was small, with long dark hair almost to her waist and her ivory garment was so long it touched the ground. I couldn't see her face but I heard the word 'beautiful" pop into the minds of men and women in a dozen languages. She carried a Japanese paper umbrella to shield herself from the sun.

The woman brought Isabella into my mind again, with her dark hair and small frame. As the opening notes of Coltrane's piece began, a saxophone fluttering slowly, my mind drifted…_despite the bright sun overhead my room stayed dark because of the floor length curtains I had drawn across the French doors that opened out to the beach. They floated slowly in the wind and then one panel pushed open fluidly and she walked into my room. She wore an ivory African caftan that came all the way to floor. Her hair was loose and hung down around her shoulders. She smiled and reached down to the bottom of the loose garment and pulled it over her head and tossed it to the floor._

_ I gasped. She wore a black bikini which exposed miles of her pale flesh. I had seen other women in this state of undress and more but never my Isabella. She giggled and walked lightly over to me on bare feet._

_ "I need your help, Edward." She stood with her back to me mere inches away and lifted her hair up off of her neck to expose where the top of her bikini tied at the base of her neck. "Can you?" she asked, turning her head just slightly to me and looking up at me through her lashes. Her eyes were so dark in the dimly lit room._

_ I reached my hands up to touch where I could feel her vertebrae on the back of her neck and slid my hands down to the bow. I pulled the end of the bow holding her top up slowly and as it released I slid a hand down with it from the top of her shoulder, over her collarbone and down to her breast, exposing it. I cupped one breast in my hand as she gasped. I brought my thumb and index finger together to squeeze her hardening nipple. She arched her back to press herself into my hand at the same time pressing her backside into my hips and my throbbing erection. I used my other hand to grip her hip to me so she couldn't escape and I moved my hand over to her other breast, uncovering it and squeezing._

_ She tipped her head back to lean on my chest and let out a moan as she continued to move under my hands and against my groin. I moved the hand on her breast up to her mouth and I slipped my thumb into her open mouth. She licked and then sucked on my thumb hungrily. I slipped my wet finger back down to her nipple and rubbed her again, my fingers slick against her hard nub._

_ She let out a cry almost like pain and I loosened my grip on her long enough to turn her and pull her top off completely. I walked backwards until I could sit down on the edge of the bed, pulling her with me and turning her around to face me. She sat down straddling my legs and her tiny hands began to unbutton my shirt. I pushed her hands away and pulled the shirt over my head and threw it aside. She wrapped her arms around my neck as I bend my head down to take her nipple in my mouth. I had one arm wrapped around her waist to stabilize her while I began to slide the other hand up her thigh. I slid the arm on her waist up until I could grab the hair at the back of her head. _

_ Pulling her head back I slid my mouth from her breast up to her neck and as I placed open mouth kisses just below her jaw I reached the edge of her bikini bottom. She gasped as my fingers slid under the garment and across her wet center. I teased her lightly, slipping my fingers over the lips of her sex. She tried to move against them to get more pressure but I withdrew slightly as she advanced._

_ "Tell me, Isabella. Say it. What do you want?" I murmured into her neck as I continued to lick my way along her jaw. _

_ She changed her approach and tried to move her lips to mine but I maintained my grip on her hair and kept her just out of reach. She whimpered with need._

_ "Just tell me what you want, Isabella." I whispered into her ear, grabbing her earlobe with my lips and tugging on it._

_ "Please, please, touch me," she moaned. I moved my hand against her wetness harder and slipped a finger into her and then another. I pumped them into her as I rubbed her clit with my thumb. She groaned and her head slipped back on it's own although I still held her hair I was now supporting the back of her head as she tipped her head back and her eyes closed._

_ I watched her face closely as I stroked her, tearing the bottom of her suit away easily and discarding it. I increased my pace slightly as her hips rocked against my hand. Her little cries became higher pitched and more frenzied as she got closer to her climax. Finally, she jerked her body against my hands roughly as she cried out, her walls clenching against my fingers and a flood of moisture soaked my hand. I withdrew my hand and fumbled with the button and zipper of my pants. I set her on the bed next to me, limp and trembling as I slipped out of my pants at vampire speed. The performance outside was reaching a crescendo; Coltrane made the saxophone sound frantic and almost hoarse._

_ Sitting back down I pulled her back on top of me and dragged her towards my engorged member. She gasped again and began to move against me. Wrapping my arm around her waist again I slipped inside her, groaning as she slipped all the way down until we were locked together. I began to move her up and down and she wrapped her arms around me again. Her cries picked up in pace again as she buried her face in my neck and pulled on my hair in time with the thrusts of her hips. We sped up together as I felt my release coming and I could only just hold off long enough to feel her contract around me before I exploded into her. _

_ As I came I took her head in both my hands and found her whimpering mouth and finally kissed her, opening my mouth to hers and moaning into it. She kissed me back sloppily as our movements together slowed and she finally slipped off of me to lie back on the bed, gazing up at me. The song outside was trailing into its slow, rhythmic conclusion; Coltrane's saxophone slowing down, the drums beat less frantic and complex._

_ No longer in shadow I could see her eyes, as red as blood, and her sharp teeth visible in her languorously open mouth. _

_ "Isabella, what…" I looked at her in shock, finally taking in the marble hardness of her skin and how cool she was, despite the outside temperature._

_ She giggled and I heard the snapping of wood…_Crack! as I tore the arm off of the rattan chair I had been sitting in. I had my other hand on my arousal and had clearly been touching myself. Embarrassed, as I wasn't one to engage in fantasies like this, I was thankful that Carlisle wasn't here to witness my reverie.

_"That wasn't the first time you had that particular fantasy-turned-nightmare, was it, Edward?" _I felt angry and chagrinned as I disposed of the remains of the chair and returned my attention to the thoughts of those near my father.

**BPOV**

Alistair picked at his linen suit and sighed as we sat on the terrace of the hotel at sunset. He had insisted on joining me for this trip and I suspect he had been phenomenally bored. I ignored his sighs and enjoyed the cool air, in an unusually good mood after the performance today.

"Was it as good as you hoped, Isabella?" He finally broke the silence when he realized I wasn't going to ask him what was wrong.

"Better, Alistair, I'm so glad I came. I hope it wasn't too dull for you." There, I bit.

"Agonizing, except I did run into an old friend. Carlisle Cullen." He perked up.

"Cullen, huh? What's he doing here? Not much livestock to feed on. Does he eat fish?"

"I'm not sure, but he invited us to meet with him and his son tonight. They're staying here, too." He looked at me with interest.

`"It doesn't sound like much fun, kind of like going to a bar with some nuns."

"His son is quite handsome and has talents." Alistair dropped his voice suggestively at this last.

"I think that that's more my type of man." I replied, gesturing to a very drunk human staggering out of a bar. "He looks likely to meet with a 'mishap'"

"As you wish, Isabella." Alistair got up, sighing. "I guess I could get tired of hearing Carlisle talk about how spiritually inspiring 'A Love Sublime' was."

"'A Love Supreme', you cretin," I responded with a smile. "Does he find it spiritually inspiring? That's interesting, it makes _me_ think of sex."

_The only time John Coltrane performed "A Love Supreme" live was in July 26, 1965, a performance at the Festival Mondial du Jazz Antibes, Juan-les-Pins, France__._


	26. Chapter 26

"_Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes one feel as you might _

_when a drowning man holds unto you._

_You want to save him,_

_but you know he will strangle you with his panic."_

_Anaïs Nin_

**2010**

The next day we went shopping with Alice and Jasper in Chicago. It had to have been hard on Isabella and Jasper being in the crush of pre-Christmas shopping in a big city but both were so determined to keep Alice happy that they didn't let on.

We similarly indulged Alice in an evening of ice-skating, which was easier, given our agility and the unlikeliness of us getting hurt if we did fall. I kept checking Isabella for signs of stress or uneasiness but she seemed actually happy to be here with us.

We got back to the hotel and Isabella and I set out again on foot. We went back to the spot in front of her old house where we had sat the night before.

"I wanted to thank you for today," she said. "It meant a lot to me to have you spend the day with me like that. Like nothing had happened." She looked down at the ground.

"Isabella, nothing has changed except that now you are telling me the truth."

She looked at me carefully, as if to see if I was sincere. The she looked straight ahead at the house and took a deep breath.

"Where were we? Oh, yeah. My deviant sex life." She spoke sarcastically and I winced.

"I was 'bait' for the boys my husband wanted. I would draw them in, flirt, make suggestive comments, dress provocatively, whatever I needed to do. And then I would generally sleep with them. Whatever I had to do to convince them to sleep with Alec. Sometimes it was both of us at once, sometimes separately, there were variations." I was taken aback by the change in her tone of voice, she had become flippant, nonchalant talking about this. She waved her hand lightly as she spoke.

As I watched her in surprise she turned to me and stroked my sleeve and leaned in. "Really, it shouldn't bother you that I did that, Edward." She licked her lip and reached her hand out to brush my hair off my forehead. "My experience means that I know how to make you happy. I can make it so good for you." Her voice had become breathy, seductive and the movement of her lips, her body, in close proximity to mine, mesmerized me. I had been trying so hard to repress the desire for her I had I was taken by surprise by her sudden aggression and I watched as her lips moved closer to mine.

She had slid her hand down from my forehead to my jaw and she was just inches away from my lips when I said, "Stop."

She froze and her eyes shot to mine with…anger? I put my hands out and pushed her gently away.

"Isabella, I know what you're doing." It was hard for me to continue to hold her at arm's length, I wanted her so badly but we needed to do this right.

"What, Edward? I need to be a monk like you? Just because you're repressed doesn't mean that I have to be." She got up and faced me defiantly. I stood up to face her.

"Isabella, this isn't what you want."

"How can you tell me what I want? I'm tired of feeling sick and embarrassed. I'm tired of living like a goddamn nun and pretending to be your sister and not being able to touch you!" She turned and ran from me. Hoping that she just went back to the hotel I began to walk back there myself.

My phone rang. _Alice._

"Hi, Alice. What do I do?"

"Thank you for trusting me, Edward." Alice sounded surprised.

"Yeah, well, I'm kind of at a loss."

"Come back. She'll show up soon."

"Thanks. I'm on my way."

"Oh, and Edward? You could…be close without going too far. But right now she feels like she repulses you. You need to prove to her that you're not put off by what she's telling you."

"Thanks, Alice."

I got back to the hotel and went up to our suite where Alice was playing with her purchases and planning our destination for the next day.

Isabella walked in half an hour later, looking calmer and somewhat sheepish.

"Hi." I said quietly.

"Hi." She said, looking down at her feet.

"Come here." I took her hand and led her to the couch. I sat down and pulled her into my lap. She curled into my lap, clutching at my coat. I stroked her arm and buried my nose in her hair and let the electricity crackle between us.

We didn't speak; we just sat like that for a few hours. It was difficult for me to not push our caresses further, especially when I thought about how she had spoken to me and touched me earlier.

After a few hours I detached myself reluctantly, she looked at me with those sad eyes but she nodded and seemed to understand my need to get some space.

"You understand I want to touch you all the time, right?" I said to her quietly.

"I do now."

"If I touch you when and how I want to it will be too hard to wait as long as we need to."

"I understand. I'm sorry about tonight."

"It's alright, Isabella. These are…" She cut me off.

"Bella."

"What?"

"You can call me Bella. The people I love, the people I trust, call me Bella."

"How many people have called you that?"

"Just Sadie and Alice."

"I'm honored. Thank you, Bella."


	27. Chapter 27

**I don't own it.**

"_I can never wash the guilt_

_or get these bloodstains off my hands_

_and it takes a lot of whiskey_

_to make these nightmares go away_

_and I cut my bleedin' heart out every night"_

_Tom Waits_

_Blue Valentines_

_1978_

**2010**

"I hated you the first time I saw you." She startled me with this and I looked at her face. She looked straight ahead at her old house, our third night here in a row. She seemed more at ease tonight, perhaps due to what had passed between us the night before. I was grateful to Alice for her insight and I would be even more grateful when she pulled off the purchases I had asked her to make. She had been puzzled at my request and the level of detail I had given her but Alice loved a shopping challenge and I had faith in her.

"Alec pointed you out to me at the symphony as our new 'friend' and I hated you. I was tired and sickened by the deal that I had made. And I hated the upper-class boys Alec picked. When he chose some dockhand or bricklayer, those were the boys I'd grown up with, I felt more comfortable. But boys like you, with your manners and education and clothes, made me feel like I had felt when he said, 'You know you don't belong here, Isabella'. The ones like you made me feel stupid and low."

"But I played my part and had you to tea. You were so innocent and kind I wanted to go running from the room. I wanted to hate you but I couldn't. Then at that party you played for me and then we listened to that jazz record and you held my hand like I was your _sweetheart. _You looked at me like I was something precious, not someone's drunken wife, a woman who was peddling her body. I couldn't stand it. I told Alec that I wouldn't see you anymore. I kept you away but he found a way to get to you anyway and he let me know it. I was determined to keep you at arm's length but you played that song for me and I…I fell in love with you right then."

"So you sent me away." I looked at her in surprise. "_After_ kissing me."

"Yeah, I wanted you to know how I felt but I needed to send you away before you found out who I was, before I broke your heart. I see now that it was a mixed message but I couldn't not kiss you."

"But you wouldn't stay away, you kept coming back and I realized that I needed to show you who I was. I've wished a million times that I'd done it in a more gentle way. In a way I was punishing myself along with you. I'm so sorry, Edward."

She looked at me, the sorrow in her eyes easy to see. I was struggling to get the image that she reminded me of out of my head, the image of her in another man's arms. I knew that I needed to pull myself back from my own discomfort to let her know that it was ok, that I forgave her.

"I know, Bella." I finally managed to choke out. "I know you're sorry. That's why I'm here, to forgive you and to understand."

She smiled at me and stood up. "Let's got back to the hotel." She said.

"Do you want to stop for tonight?" I asked, looking at her face with concern.

"No, I want to finish this tonight. But we need to go for a drive. Let's go back and get the rental."

We walked back to the hotel and got into the car. She began driving west through the city. She got on the interstate and drove northwest for a while. Getting off the interstate I could see that she was in a less populated part of the city, she was passing condos, apartment buildings, parking garages and warehouses. She stopped at a small field with a few trees and an iron gate over the entrance. It said "Read Dunning Memorial Park". It sounded like a cemetery but there were no headstones, only several large circles of concrete spread out with a path uniting them.

We got out of the car and Bella walked under the arch and followed the path until she got to one of the concrete disks. There was a bronze plate that said "The Sick and Infirm at Dunning". She sat down at the edge of the disk and I joined her.

"After you left," she started speaking quietly, almost in a monotone, "After I drove you away I hardly remember anything. I drank a lot. Alec threw parties. I stayed in my room if I could. Otherwise I sat in the middle of his parties and pretended. A few weeks after the last time I saw you a black man showed up at the party. It was quite scandalous but Alec insisted he stay, that I keep him company. He knew my name without being introduced and when I asked him how he showed me my book, the one I had lent you. He said that he was a friend of yours. I tried to throw him out; he dragged me out of my house, to an empty building. I could see that he wasn't human, even as drunk as I was. He said that he was going to kill me and I…I thanked him. It would have been such a relief to not feel that way, missing you, hating myself, my husband, my life."

"Cruel bastard, when he saw my relief he decided to change me instead. He said that you had sent him to me, that you had told him how 'delightful and accommodating' I was. I believed him, he had my book and I knew that you had to be angry with me. He changed me and when I awoke we were hundreds of miles from Chicago and I had no idea how long I had been gone but I needed to get back, to make sure Sadie was alright."

"But Laurent told me that if I went back I would kill my sister. I begged him to come help me; it took me months to convince him. The first place I went was the home that she had been in. I found an employee who I knew and begged him to tell me where she was. He told me that the flu had swept through the facility, they had contacted Alec and begged him to move her and he hadn't responded. Most of girls who had been left there and some staff had gotten sick and she had died." She paused and then swept her hand around us.

"This was a potter's field. This was where they buried the poor, inmates of jails and mental asylums. This is where they buried my sister, with no headstone. Somewhere in this field. They put the plaques and markers here about twenty years ago."

She was quiet. Then she got up and I followed her.

"I'm almost done. One more stop." We got in the car and headed back towards the city. After just a few miles she stopped in front of a much fancier set of buildings, this was clearly a fancier cemetery. We walked in the gates and towards a beautiful mausoleum, a huge marble structure of two stories.

The building was closed but we were able to pull the old door open easily without much damage to the lock. She walked upstairs to an ostentatious marble gallery with copious flowers, plaques and small statues. She walked to a wall covered in tiny bronze rectangles. She reached out to touch a plaque that said "Isabella Tremont 1899-1918". On either side of her were plates with the names "Jane Tremont" and "Alec Tremont". We took a seat on a marble bench facing the wall. She stared at the wall and it's adornments for a long minute and then continued in her low monotone.

"I went to the house. I waited until night. I made Laurent promise that he would guard Jane's room while I dealt with Alec. I woke him up before I killed him so that he knew it was me, but he was able to call my name right before I slashed him open and Jane came running in."

She paused for a long time, clearly upset. Then she continued. "She came in to see me, she came in saying my name like a sister, like she loved me. I was in the middle of the bloodlust. I was only a few months old. I couldn't stop myself." She was panting now and emotional. "I killed her and then I killed Laurent for not stopping her. I tore his body apart and set the house on fire. Alec had never told anyone I was gone, it was too embarrassing. He told them I had the flu and recuperating slowly. It was assumed that I perished in the fire as well."

"I manipulated a shady lawyer to take care of the funeral arrangements out of the estate. I posed as a cousin to whom the estate had been left and he arranged the paperwork and the will. I made the funeral arrangements and then left the rest to the agency that had taken care of Sadie."

She got up and walked over to the plaque with her name on it. "I hate that my name is next to his." She turned to me with a grim smile. "That's all. That's the whole story."

"What about the next ninety years before you came to Forks?"

She waved her hand dismissively. "I killed people, I lived my life in a fury, at you, at myself, Alec, Laurent. I blamed all of you for the misery I felt and I knew deep down that I didn't deserve to have any happiness, love or even to die and be relieved from the remorse. I met Alice and I tried to be a good friend but I was going to hurt her, I could see it."

"In 1940, Alice and I were in Akron and heard about Alcoholic's Anonymous, it had been around for about five years. She suggested, maybe jokingly, that I try it. 'Let go of my resentments, come clean about my past'. I laughed at the time but then an acquaintance of mine made the same suggestion last March and I…I was willing to try whatever it took to not feel like this."

"It's lucky for me that you did." I said. "Come on, let's go. We're done here."

She nodded at me and took my hand as we walked out of the mausoleum.


	28. Chapter 28

**a/n I still don't own it. **

"_When age chills the blood, when our pleasures are past_

— _For years fleet away with the wings of the dove_

— _The dearest remembrance will still be the last, _

_Our sweetest memorial the first kiss of love."_

_The First Kiss of Love_

_Lord Byron_

_1806_

**1919**

Nearly a year passed before Carlisle deemed me fit to go among humans, a period of time that he deemed to be much less than average. He was proud of me for my control and I was pleased that I had performed well on this most important of tests. For Carlisle, restraint and control were everything.

The first thing that I insisted on doing was going back to Chicago. I told myself that I just wanted to tie up my parent's affairs but after a year I still wanted to see Isabella again. What I would do was uncertain. Carlisle had warned me that I could never reveal myself to anyone who had known me for the changes in me were too great to be ignored. I promised him that I would do no such thing, I told myself I only wanted to see that she was well.

Did I want to see her well? If she had been suffering, ill, or abused would I have been pleased? If she was happy would I be bitter or did I love her enough to want that for her? If she were free, if there was a chance that I could convince her, with my increased attractiveness, strength, abilities, to be with me, what would I have done? Would I have begged Carlisle to let me have her, to let me change her?

These questions swirled through my head as I walked the familiar streets to her house. I was astonished to see that the home had been partially rebuilt; I could smell new materials, fresh bricks and mortar. There had been structural damage, I could smell smoke on the older bricks. A fire, her house had experienced a significant fire. I could hear the thoughts of the current residents; no one I recognized so I knocked on the door.

A young woman answered the door with a toddler in her arms. She smiled at me, and asked if she could help me. _"Handsome,"_ she thought.

"I used to know the family who lived here, the Tremonts?" Her face looked sad_. "So sad, he must have been in the war. He doesn't know."_

"They…" she paused. "I'm so sorry. There was a fire. Mr. and Mrs. Tremont and his sister, they…" She didn't need to finish her sentence; I saw it in her head. Dead, my Isabella was gone.

"How? When?" I pressed her for information, my eyes must have been glaring, my posture stiffened. She gasped with fear.

"I…I have to go." She closed the door on me and latched it. I could hear her footsteps running up the steps and her heart pounding. I had frightened her out of her wits in my desperation for information.

I went down to a neighboring bar and, checking to be sure I didn't know anyone there, pried the rest of the information about the fire from the lips and minds of the patrons. The fire had been in July of the previous year, just months after I had last seen her.

I was devastated. I went back to Carlisle, grieving her loss, but found myself unable to speak to him of her. Would he understand my love for a married woman? He was so moral, so upright, surely he would judge her and think less of me for loving her.

I chalked the experience up to heartbreaking first love and anticipated that there would be a more suitable woman for me in my future. Carlisle had assured me that there were many like us and I assumed that I would fall in love again someday.

A short number of years later Carlisle found Esme. He met her as a young girl and felt an instant connection to her. When he encountered her dying as a young woman he changed her, finding that person he was meant to be with. If anyone deserved such happiness it was Carlisle and I didn't begrudge him his love as much as I envied it.

But Carlisle and Esme felt badly for me, they wanted me to find someone to love the way that they loved each other. So when Carlisle encountered a beautiful young woman dying in the streets of Rochester he changed her, for me. Unfortunately, Rosalie never had any interest in me nor I her. Maybe before I had been changed, when I couldn't have heard Rosalie's thoughts. But hearing the utter shallowness and banality of her thoughts ruined any chance we had at being together.

Luckily, a short time later, Rosalie found Emmett dying in the woods and begged Carlisle to change him for her. So then I was living with two happy couples, making my loneliness even more apparent.

It became even more obvious that I wasn't meant to find anyone when Alice and Jasper joined us. What was frustrating was that I knew that I was capable of love; I knew that I _had been_ capable of love. I was convinced that my "gift" was a curse for it prevented me from idealizing any woman, for how can you when all of her thoughts, no matter how ugly or boring, were available to you?

I threw myself into my music, books and studies for the next 90 years, every year that passed without a change in my "relationship status", as they would say in the present decade, further proof that the love of my life had died in a fire in 1918.


	29. Chapter 29

"_Say, it's only a paper moon_

_Sailing over a cardboard sea_

_But it wouldn't be make-believe_

_If you believed in me_

_Yes, it's only a canvas sky_

_Hanging over a muslin tree_

_But it wouldn't be make-believe_

_If you believed in me"_

_It's Only a Paper Moon_

_Billy Rose / Harold Arlen /E. Y. "Yip" Harburg_

_1933_

**2011**

I was determined that Bella and I would make it. Despite her fury and secretiveness, despite the fact that I was completely unaccustomed to being in an intimate relationship with anyone, despite the fact that she was filled with toxic self-loathing that had a tendency to escape from her and scorch anyone too close to her. She had told me her whole shameful story. She was working on her issues. I had a psychic sister to help me and I wanted desperately to be with her. A thing for which I would have to wait for another two months and eighteen days.

Except that then she told me that we needed to wait until June 5th when I graduated from high school. As if I weren't one hundred and nine years old.

"I won't start out looking like a pedophile." She crossed her arms in the living room of our suite in Chicago.

"Who's going to see? Are we going to make out in the Fork's Diner?" As soon as I said it the vision filled my head and I began to consider the height of the counters.

"We've waited ninety years. What's another six months?"

"Bella, I've graduated from high school dozens of times. It's not going to make me miraculously more mature. I'm already 'eighteen' and it's not like my parents will object."

Bella rolled her eyes at the word "parents" and I began to wonder how things would change once Bella was a part of our family. I knew that she would never agree to going to high school to help maintain our stories and being with me as a high school student the next time we had to move would also likely not be an option.

"I'm not going to live in the Cullen vampire mansion." Bella spoke with a hint of scorn.

"You won't!" Alice breezed into the room and sat down between us. "You'll just live in the cabin." She looked at me with a smile.

"This is not over." I said to Bella over my sister's dark head.

"We've got things to do, remember?" Alice winked at me. I rose and offered my hand to Bella who looked at me in surprise.

"It's our last night in Chicago and I've made plans." I left her to my sister's waiting hands and walked out of the room over Bella's confused protests.

I dressed myself in the tuxedo Alice had rented for me and went downstairs to confirm the arrangements I'd made with the maitre'd.

I had arranged for Jasper and Alice to drop Isabella off at a specific address at nine o'clock. I had a car waiting. I'd rented the oldest car I could get my hands on which ended up being a 1940's Ford Sedan. Not quite right, but close enough.

I waited outside, leaning against the stone arches. At nine o'clock Jasper and Alice pulled up. Alice pulled Isabella out of the car and placed her on the sidewalk, exactly where I'd specified. Isabella looked around confused, beautiful in a long, sleeveless black silk gown, surprisingly close to the one I'd described to Alice. Her hair was piled on top of her head. She was breathtaking and I paused a moment before nodding to Alice. Alice gave Bella a kiss on the cheek and with a delighted glance at me, raced back to the car and they drove away. She turned to me.

Walking towards her I said, "Do you remember the first time we saw each other?"

She looked at the building we stood in front of. "Is this it?"

"This is where I first saw you." I said. "You were wearing a long black dress, pretty close to this one, and you got into your husband's car and drove away."

"What are we doing here, Edward?" She asked me with a smile.

I reached her on the sidewalk and put my hand on her cheek. "I wanted a chance to change the past. This time I get to take your hand and take you with me."

She smiled at me sadly but offered her hand. I took it and led her to the waiting car. Once she was seated on the passenger side I got in.

"Where are we going?" she asked.

"Back to the hotel, I have a surprise for you." We drove back to the hotel we had just left. But this time I led her to the small lounge that I had reserved for the evening. I sat her down next to the piano and took a seat at the instrument.

"This is what I wanted to be able to do." I began to play the piano for her and she raised an eyebrow skeptically at me.

"This is what you wanted to do with me?" She smiled at me.

I laughed. "Among other things." I continued to play, taking requests from her, for the next few hours. I was relieved to be finally doing something enjoyable with her and being able to make our own happier memories here in Chicago.

The next day we took flowers to both cemeteries and Isabella was able to say her sorrys and her goodbyes to Jane and Sadie and we left Chicago in time to be home for Christmas for Esme and Carlisle.

The unanswered questions between us surfaced again as Bella participated in her first Cullen Christmas. My family actually showed surprising restraint this year, even Alice, as they were mindful of Bella's feelings about our affluence. But our gift giving, especially towards her, was difficult for her and she had to retreat to her cabin quite early, looking as though she was going to explode.

I was concerned. No sooner had Bella and I resolved the issue of her past and our relationship status but new conflicts emerged, having to do with money, family, and the unsuitability of my adopted age. I again chose not to push these issues, hoping that she would again find a way to resolve them but I began to resent what a passive role I had been forced to take in our relationship.

As I predicted, Bella found a way to surface these issues. Unfortunately, she did it in the most catastrophic way possible.

It was the beginning of March; I was counting just two weeks until Bella would have been in AA for a year. I was still hoping that she would decide that I could at least take her on a real date then. Bella and Alice had gone out hunting; they had said that they were going to stay local as Alice had plans to drive with Jasper to Seattle to meet Rosalie and Emmett who were going to college there. I was enjoying the rare quiet in the house when I heard Bella return, slamming the door and yelling my name.

I rushed downstairs to see her pacing the living room, her clothes were somewhat dirty and her sleeve was torn. She was clearly distressed and angry.

"Bella, what…" She cut me off.

"Werewolves, Edward? You guys live a couple miles away from a bunch of werewolves and no one bothered to tell me?"

"You saw the werewolves? Where's Alice?"

"With the wolves, Edward! Apparently I violated a treaty that I had no idea existed! You didn't think to tell me?" She was furious. I thought quickly. I had to get in touch with Carlisle.

"Bella, let me call Carlisle. He'll sort this out."

"No, Edward. First you need to tell me the details of the treaty."

"I think it would be better if…"

"Now, you need to tell me now. They have Alice."

"They have their territory, we have ours." I decided to send Carlisle a text message explaining that there was an emergency while I spoke to her. "We don't kill people, go on their land, they leave us alone and we keep each other's secrets. What happened?"

"Alice and I were hunting and I went on their land. A group of five wolves and six men showed up. Alice was closer so they grabbed her. They were talking to me about breaking the treaty and how they were going to kill either her or me. I thought I should find out details of the treaty so I could figure out what would happen to you and your family when I go back and kill a couple of dogs!" Bella's voice picked up pace and fury as she talked. She reminded me of when she had first walked in the door nearly a year ago.

That homicidal fury in her face had returned and this time Jasper and Emmett weren't there to restrain her.

"Isabella," I begged. "Please stop. There are better ways to deal with this. We've had a treaty with them for decades; we can work this out."

"Work this out!" She raged at me. "Working out compromises is for humans and cowards. We are monsters, Edward, we don't have to negotiate with dogs while they hurt our families!"

"Isabella, we are not monsters. If you go out there and slaughter those boys, you will ruin everything. Everything Carlisle has built, everything my family has worked for," my voice dropped. "Everything you and I have been working on." I begged her now with everything I had, there was no way I could stop her on my own and I had no idea where the rest of my family was.

"Edward, you know the choice I made last time I had to choose between you and my sister. Alice is my sister; don't make me hurt you like that again. Because I'll make the same choice."

"Isabella, don't do this." I took one last stab at stopping her. "I won't…I can't forgive you again."

There was a moment of quiet in her fury, an eye in the hurricane, she looked so sad, why was she always so sad?

"I have to go get Alice." She turned from me and ran off into the trees.

I had lost her again.


	30. Chapter 30

**Disclaimer: Stephanie Meyer has ownage.**

"_The devil popped around today_

_selling promises and potions_

_that could take our memory away_

_help forget I'd ever met you_

_Tell me... can you please take away the misery?_

_Give me a baker's dozen please,_

_wrap me up to go away_

_But I want to_

_I need to_

_forget you_

_Don't want to, but I need to let you go"_

_Potions (Deliverance Mix)_

_Puscifer_

_2009_

**2011**

I paced the empty house in a fury. Furious with myself and my family for not warning Bella about the reservation and our treaty. Furious with Alice for letting Bella stray onto their territory. Furious with Bella for turning on me, for leaving me again.

But mostly I was furious with myself for letting myself be lulled into complacency by her. I let her into my heart again, trusted her that she had changed and she had betrayed me again. I had let her control the pace of our interactions and had not forced the resolution of important issues. I had let her treat me like a child because I thought it was the only way to keep her. And she had left me anyway.

I had no idea what to do next. Carlisle hadn't responded to my text or subsequent calls. Jasper didn't answer his phone, neither did Alice. Emmett and Rosalie were too far away to help. Even Esme was nowhere to be found. I couldn't take on that many wolves on my own with just Bella and Alice. I was frozen in indecision when my cell phone rang. It was Alice.

"Edward." She spoke before I could. "Stay where you are. I'll be there in ten minutes."

"Alice, what…" She had hung up.

In eight minutes and thirty seconds Alice burst in the door. I ran to greet her. Her jacket was torn at the hem and her hair was messy from running and she smelled awful but she was otherwise unharmed.

She smiled at me and led me to the couch, where she forced me to sit down.

"Alice, you need to tell me what's going on! Where's Bella? What happened?"

Alice put a hand on my arm and stroked it soothingly. "Everything is fine, Edward. Bella will be back in a twenty-eight minutes. I saw all of it."

"When did you see it, Alice?" I began to suspect my sister's tone.

"Edward, don't be angry but…I saw it all before it happened." She looked at me steadily.

"Alice, are you insane? What's going on? Do you know what Bella said to me? Do you realize it's all over between us?" I was furious, frantic, saddened by what I'd said and heartbroken at how Bella had responded.

"Yes, I know you gave her an ultimatum and she went anyway. I also know what she said so you would be too shocked to follow her. Your relationship as it's been is over. That's the path I saw for you before this happened."

"Alice, please tell me what's going on."

"Edward, in twenty-three minutes she'll get back and you will argue. You have to confront her and she'll either leave or stay. I see both futures right now. But you had no future before this."

"I have to trust you, right?" She smiled again sadly and nodded.

"OK, but go change. You smell." I grimaced at her and she slapped at my shoulder before leaving to go upstairs.

Sure enough, Bella walked in the door in twenty minutes, unharmed and smelling of dog. She saw me and fixed her eyes on the ground. "Alice got back OK, right?" she said without looking at me.

"Yes. Would you like to sit down and tell me what happened?" I gestured to the couch. I had moved to an armchair and was doing the best I could to stay calm.

"What difference does it make now? It's over. You gave me a choice and I made it. Alice is safe. I'll get my things and go." She was angry but in spite of her words she walked closer to the couch.

"You owe me the truth about this. You threw our relationship away over this. I deserve to know."

She sighed and sat down, still not meeting my gaze. "When I first came to town and was going to meetings one of the men from the reservation, a guy named Harry, saw me at a meeting. He must have known what I was and could tell from my eyes I wasn't a…'vegetarian'. But then he went back out, started drinking again and didn't see me again so he let it go. Then I bought that car, my Datsun, from a kid out on the reservation. I went on the reservation to do it. Which I had no idea was a violation of a treaty because no one told me and the kid had no idea what I was."

"You didn't notice the smell?" I couldn't believe that she'd gone out there twice now in the last year.

"Teenage boys smell, OK?" she gave me a brief smile at this and then continued. "So today Alice and I are hunting and I go over the boundary and she doesn't stop me, she follows me. Then this big group of wolves and men show up and Harry, back on the wagon now, remembers me and the kid, Jake, recognizes me and all of a sudden the wolves are all pissed because I've broken the treaty. And Alice is watching all of it and getting closer to the wolves and they grab her and say that I have to face their tribunal and we're all going to face the consequences. So after I get the details and an ultimatum from you I go back and convince them to let me trade for Alice."

"How did you convince them to let you go?" I was amazed at how calmly she had handled the situation. I had assumed that she had gone out there as the furious creature I had seen her less than an hour ago.

"I knew that you would never trust me to negotiate calmly but I knew that I had to go alone to show them that I wasn't a threat and because I had to talk to Harry privately. They let me talk to him, not alone, but without interrupting."

"What did you say?"

"I talked to him about recovery. I told him that I'd made mistakes and had come here to make amends. I convinced him that I had changed and that I had never fed on any humans here. I talked to him as one alcoholic to another about forgiveness. I convinced him to ask them to let me go. They did." She was sad but calm. I felt guilty that I had never trusted her to act calmly or maturely.

"I never wanted to hurt you, Edward. I'm sorry that it ended this way."

"Bella, Alice let the whole thing happen because they way we were handling things wasn't working." She shot her eyes to me in surprise.

"I have let you control this relationship from the beginning, despite the fact that I didn't trust you. But your problems with my age, family and money aren't going to go away and I can't let you treat me like a child anymore."

She tried to interrupt me but I continued. "Bella, I love my family. They have supported and loved me for decades when you weren't around. I won't abandon them because you are uncomfortable around people who love each other. What you don't see is that they are your family, too. Alice is a sister to you but do you know that Rosalie defends you when you're not around? That she works on that junk heap of yours so you can pretend to be self-sufficient?"

"Do you know that Emmett bought himself a stereo so that you would take his stereo because he knew you loved music and couldn't stand you listening to a crappy portable CD player? Did you know that Jasper puts up with hours of me whining about you and does nothing but encourage our relationship even though having you around, especially early on, was excruciating for him? I don't even need to tell you about how much Carlisle and Esme love you." Bella's face had softened and she looked as though she would cry if she could.

"And what about the money? What is it about having money that's so agonizing to you? We aren't making you do anything shameful for money. We want you…I want you to have everything you want. What's wrong with that?"

"It's disrespectful to you." She spoke, looking at her hands again. "I feel like I'm using you."

"What in the world, Bella? How could you be using me?" She looked embarrassed.

"When you wanted to be with me and you said we would be poor, I rejected you. Now I want to be with you when you have money? It doesn't feel right to me. It feels like I'm using you."

"Bella." I was stunned. This possibility had never occurred to me. "Bella, you had your sister to think of. I understand. I don't think you're trying to take advantage of me." She looked unconvinced and I continued. "Bella, that's kind of my point, though. You have made all the decisions, decided how everything would go. You have treated me as though I was a child."

I stood up. "Bella, I am a man. Not a human but a man. I want to be with you as a man. I want to be your lover, your husband, your partner. But if you can't see me as a man, if you can't let me have that, then I can't be with you. You have controlled me, even in your absence, for ninety years. I need you to let me stand next to you instead of me being on my knees all the time." I shook with fury, with fear, with desire and I had to get out of the room with her. She couldn't even look at me; she couldn't even meet my eyes.

I walked out of the room.


	31. Chapter 31

**Disclaimer: Stephanie Meyer has ownage.**

"_Tilling my own grave to keep me level..._

_Jam another dragon down the hole..._

_Digging to the rhythm and the echo of a solitary siren..._

_one that pushes me along, and leaves me so..._

_desperate and ravenous..._

_I'm so Weak and powerless over you..._

_Someone feed the monkey while I dig in search of china..._

_White as Dracula as I approach the bottom..._

_so desperate and ravenous._

_I'm so Weak and powerless over you..."_

_Weak and Powerless_

_A Perfect Circle_

_2003_

**2011**

Bella disappeared for the next two weeks. I knew she hadn't moved out of the cabin, I could pick up traces of mundane conversations she had with my family but she avoided me. I had given her a choice and she had to decide what she wanted. I didn't even know if she_ could_ give me what I wanted.

On March 18th, her one year anniversary, her sobriety birthday, Carlisle and Esme accompanied her to a meeting in town. I could see in their heads when they returned the hugs she'd received from the others in the meeting as well as my parents. I could see her shy smile as she clutched the little metal coin she'd received.

I was at a loss as to what she would do next and oddly, so was Alice. She would only tell me that there were still two possible futures.

I was putting my books in my locker at the end of school the next day when I became aware of a flurry of excited thoughts in the minds of the humans. There was someone unfamiliar on school grounds. As I got closer to the parking lot I heard the teenage boys I went to school with admiring the visitor.

_"She's hot,"_ thought a junior walking back into the school_. "Someone's big sister? She can pick me up from school anytime. But maybe not in that car."_

I laughed, suspecting who it was, and as I got to the edge of the lot I saw her, leaning against her car at the other side, near my Volvo. She looked as beautiful as ever, dressed in jeans and a brown wool blazer. I eyed the expensive boots she wore and knew that Alice must have had a hand in her outfit. She had taken more care with her appearance than normal and I hoped that it was for my benefit.

I smiled at her and as I walked towards her she gave me a nervous smile. Looking around us I realized that there were an unusual number of loiterers for the end of the day, the students of Forks High, male and female, were watching her.

She would never have come here unless she meant to try, would she? Maybe she was just saying goodbye. But then why would she come here, where we would be observed?

The thoughts and speculations of the human students of Forks swirled around me.

_"She looks like she belongs with the Cullens; those eyes, and beautiful."_

_ "New student?"_

_ "What are you going to do?"_ This last was Jasper and I looked to my side to see Alice and Jasper watching me. Alice had a knowing smile and she gave me a nod.

I knew what I was going to do and how Bella responded would tell me if we had a chance.

Her eyes were locked on me as I walked towards her decisively and as I got to her I took her face in my hands and kissed her so forcefully on the lips that she was pressed back into her car and I heard a groan of compressing metal behind her. She didn't pull away but she kept her mouth closed to mine so I slipped my thumb to her lower lip and forced it open to accept the tip of my tongue.

My head spun as I ravaged her mouth, this was nothing like the chaste kiss we had shared in her husband's basement in 1918. This was passionate, raw and hungry and it unleashed feelings I had suppressed for her in the last year. She whimpered into my mouth as I pulled her away from the car slightly so I could slip my arm down her back to her waist and pull her hips against me. She slipped her arms up to my shoulders and dug her hand into my hair and clenched her fist, hard.

I had never kissed anyone like this before but I had years of mental images and decades of lust to pour into my efforts as I tasted every corner of her delectable mouth and lips. She wrapped her leg slightly around my calf and tilted her head to allow me access to her mouth.

I lost track of time and place until I heard Alice's voice screaming in my head, _"Edward! Wrap it up! Principal coming!_" I reluctantly pulled myself away from her, her eyes still closed. I became aware of my environment again and realized that we had amassed a large audience of students and a few teachers and the vice principal were walking towards us. I took a step away from Bella and her eyes opened. She took our surroundings sheepishly but then shot me a dazzling smile and reached out to take my hand.

My teachers backed off, they had no desire to confront me, not only was I a perfect student with no discipline problems but their instincts told them to fear me.

_"Of course, that's why high school girls aren't good enough for him."_ The thoughts of my fellow students began to break in again_. "Lucky bastard." "I always thought he was gay but he just likes college chicks." "I thought he was going to fuck her against her car."_ That last one was accompanied by an image of Bella that earned the unlucky senior a glare from me that he would have nightmares about for a while.

I turned back to Bella, "Can you give me your car keys, love?" She looked at me curiously but reached into her pocket and pulled them out.

"Sure, what…" Her voice trailed off as I turned and took in the students around us until I found what I needed. Alan Brewer, I had P.E. with him last year. He was a junior and had to ride to school with his sister, Kristen, a senior with a high-pitched voice and a love for country music. Alan hated country music and was a pretty nice guy as far as I could hear from his thoughts.

"Alan," I called. He looked at me in surprise. We had never spoken, he had no idea I knew his name. I tossed the keys to him and he caught them, surprised by his own reflexes.

"I'll get you the title tomorrow." I gave him an encouraging smile. He looked at me stunned and then smiled back. "Uh, thanks, Edward."

I turned back to Bella and tugged on her hand. "Let's go." I began working towards my Volvo.

"Edward, my car…"she stopped and bit her lip.

"We're going to Port Angeles to buy you a new car." She frowned. "I need you to let me do this. Let me take care of you. Let me see I can be myself and you won't go away." She nodded.

"I'll try, I want to do this." She became shy again as she said it.

After a long afternoon at car dealerships in Port Angeles we settled on a Mini-Cooper. I had been leaning towards a Lexus SUV and she had been drifting towards the used car lots so this seemed like a good compromise. The drawback I hadn't thought of in my excitement to buy her a car was that I wouldn't be able to talk to her on the way home.

When we got back to the house we stopped outside the garage and she smiled at me shyly again. "What now, Boss?" I smirked at her. "I kind of like that. Can you call me 'Master', too?"

She moved closer to me and put her hands on my torso. "That was a pretty hot kiss you gave me earlier." She spoke breathily, tilting her face up to mine as she got closer. "Was it just for show?"

I put my hands on her arms to stop her where she was. "What do you think?" I asked her, my face serious. She paused, startled at my change in mood.

"No. I think you've been holding back. Are you ready to be with me like that?" Her eyes flickered away, fearing my answer.

"I think that we have some things to talk about first. I don't know that I can…hold off with you as long as we need to if I kiss you like that again."

"O.K.." she looked down again, rejected.

"Bella, don't misunderstand me." I took her chin in mine and pulled it up so she had to look at me. "I have never wanted any woman the way I want you. I hardly think of anything else. It's embarrassing." She had a small smile on her face as she looked into my eyes to see if I was telling the truth.

"But," I continued, "I feel like we have to resolve some things between us first. And you have a tendency to use, uh, _intimacy_, to resolve problems. You use it to manipulate me, for example." She nodded solemnly.

"Let's go to the cabin. Alice is going to fall out the window if she tries any harder to see what's going on out here." She looked at the house and waved at my sister as we walked from the garage to the cabin.

I settled into her tiny living room, careful to maintain enough distance from her to keep a clear head.

"My family." I said to her. "I want to stay with them, I want _us_ to stay with them. We're safer in numbers, our strengths compliment each other and I love them. They have embraced you without reservation and I think that you will come to love them as I do."

"Do I have to go to high school?" She picked at a thread on her jeans.

"No." I laughed. "And we can live here in the cabin. It will be nice to have some privacy, actually." I had to try to keep myself focused on the conversation so I didn't get too distracted thinking about living in the "honeymoon cabin" with Bella.

"The money is the other thing. I don't want to be ashamed of having money and I want to buy you things."

"Can I keep my job?" I was encouraged by her question. Although I had no desire to make Bella ask for permission from me forever it was nice that she was allowing me to make decisions.

"Of course. I just don't want to have to live on your income." I smiled.

We talked for a while more before Alice couldn't resist showing up. She dragged us back to the house where Bella did a good job of being relaxed and friendly while Esme and Alice gave her knowing smiles and Carlisle pulled me aside.

"I, uh, got a call from your school today." He looked at me, failing to conceal his amusement.

"Let me guess, inappropriate public displays of affection." I was a little embarrassed to have this conversation with him.

"Yeah. Can I congratulate you?" Carlisle smiled at me broadly and pulled me into a hug.

My family was able to stop the hovering after a few minutes and we settled into a quiet evening.

After school the next day Bella and I went hunting and then sat down for another conversation about the future. We were able to get the smaller details hammered out fairly quickly while I struggled to surface the larger one that lurked in my mind.

We had settled on a workable plan in which we stayed here for a few years so she could continue to go to her meetings. I could attend the community college or get a job so it looked like we weren't just idle-rich vampires. She agreed to let me buy her things and admitted that she was getting more comfortable with my family.

Finally, when I had exhausted all the minute details I braced myself for the big ones.

"I have a compromise to offer you, Bella." She tilted her head at me curiously; my tone had become more serious. I stood up and began pacing the room. "I am willing to wait until I graduate to…move forward with our relationship." I left the condition unspoken as I tried to gauge her reaction.

"If?" she said, waving her hand to me to continue.

"If you'll marry me." I spit it out quickly and her face froze. "I know you probably have a really negative idea about marriage, but you were married _ninety years ago. _To a_ gay man_. It'll be different with me, with us. I've never let you down, Bella. I waited almost a century for you." Her face was still motionless, she was clearly thinking. I couldn't hold still. No matter how smart it might have been for me to stop talking right then I pressed on.

I knelt down in front of her and took a handkerchief out of my pocket. Wrapped up in it was my mother's ring.

"I have carried this around for this whole time, Bella. I had it in my pocket back in 1918 when I asked you to leave your husband." She looked at me, puzzled.

"I know that you couldn't have accepted an engagement ring from me then, officially. But I had been hoping you would have taken it for when you were free, as a promise." I still couldn't anything from her face but a slight hint of confusion.

"Bella, honey. You have to say something." I frowned at her and she moved her head very slowly as if thinking still. After an eternity she finally spoke.

"Edward, I want you to know that when I say this I'm not trying to manipulate you, OK?" She spoke very carefully, as if trying not to frighten or upset me. I nodded, my eyes glued to her face, still on my knees with the antique ring in my hand.

"Edward, I have a lot of fear about marriage, mostly that I'll disappoint you. But I will marry you, after your graduation." I smiled broadly and grabbed her hand to slip the ring onto it while simultaneously leaning forward to kiss her. I got the ring onto her finger but she evaded my lips and pushed back on my chest before I could take her in my arms.

"I'm not done," she insisted. This time she was the one who got up and began to pace. I watched her from the couch, which I had pulled myself up onto. I was feeling a little insecure. Bella had never pushed me away before.

"If we get married after you graduate…" she paused and looked at me. I nodded, waiting for what was holding her back. "Does that mean we have to wait until we get married to, you know?" She looked down, embarrassed.

I looked at her, realization of what she was saying coming to me slowly. I got up off the couch and moved towards her, picking up speed as I got closer. She gasped at the speed with which I had her in my arms, crushing her to me. I kissed her hard and then put my lips to her ear and whispered, laughing.

"Do you think I'm crazy?"


	32. Chapter 32

"_i like my body when it is with your_

_body. It is so quite a new thing._

_Muscles better and nerves more._

_i like your body. i like what it does,_

_i like its hows. i like to feel the spine_

_of your body and its bones, and the trembling_

_-firm-smooth ness and which i will_

_again and again and again_

_kiss, i like kissing this and that of you…"_

_E. E. Cummings_

_1925_

**2011**

"Are you sure you don't need me to sprinkle rose petals around or run you a bath?" Bella spoke to me with mock-seriousness as I picked her up and carried her to her bedroom. "It is your first time, after all."

I growled at her teasing and threw her on the bed. I crawled up the bed towards where she pulled herself up and was lying against the pillows, laughing.

"You know why the cabin has a bed, don't you?" I positioned myself above her, not touching her.

"No, why?" She pushed herself up to try and kiss me and I kept myself out of reach.

"This is the honeymoon cabin." I leaned down to kiss her lightly as I spoke. "It's where Emmett and Rosalie had their honeymoon the first time we lived in Forks."

She laughed and pulled away so she could talk to me without my teasing. "You mean I've been living in the honeymoon cabin this whole time?" she faked a look of shock. Her face grew serious then and she put a hand on my chest to hold me at arm's length.

"I'm serious, you know. I want this to be special for you."

I pulled her back down to me and this time I pressed my weight down onto her. "All I need for this to be special is to have you here." With that I kissed her again, deeply and she wrapped her arms around me and pressed herself to me in return.

I moved my mouth down to her jaw and neck, marveling that I was here, after all this time, with her. She gasped at the attentions of my mouth and tongue as she moved her hands into my hair. I could feel her moving beneath me; her sounds, the smell, the feel of her was beyond what I had imagined.

I ran my fingers delicately from her collarbone to the buttons on her blouse and began to undo them. I returned my mouth to hers and she met me hungrily, taking my bottom lip between her teeth and biting. I moaned and lost patience with buttons when she did this and tore her shirt open and pulled it away. I was frantic, pushing against her, trying to feel everything at once.

I needed to slow down, I wanted this to be slow and sweet but I wasn't sure if I could contain my lust, my enthusiasm. To say that I'd waited a while for this was an understatement.

But then Bella, my Isabella, she knew what I wanted and with a groan she pulled herself away and forced her way to the top, straddling me and pushed my arms down. Breathing hard, she smiled at me through messed up hair and leaning down murmured, "Slow down, we have forever."

I took a deep breath and looked up at her. I trusted her, for the first time ever, I trusted her. She had seen what I needed and would give it to me.

I nodded to her, keeping my eyes on hers. She slid her hands from my waist up to my chest, pushing my shirt up and helping me take it off. She ran her hands across my chest and down my arms. When she got to my hands she pulled one of them up and placed it on her chest between her breasts. She released my hand and gave me a slight nod. I slid my hand to her breast, first brushing it with the back of my fingers and then finding the hard nub of her nipple through her lace bra with my fingers. The lace felt scratchy compared to her the silk of her skin. She bit her lip and moaned at my touch and I was entranced that I could do this to her. I brought my other hand to the other breast and stroked them through the material until she arched her back into my touch.

She reached behind her back and undid the clasp of her bra. I slipped it off of her and marveled at the sight of her before returning my hands to her breasts. They felt perfect in my hands and I increased the amount of friction gradually. I rubbed my open palms against her nipples and then flicked one harder with my nail. She cried out and bucked her hips against me.

Which brought my attention immediately to the raging erection she was straddling and I brought my hands down to her hips to hold her there. She pulled away again, lifting her self up and running her hand down the center of my chest, stopping at my belt. I tried to get up and reach for her again but she gently guided my arms up over my head. Returning to my belt she held my eyes as she ran her hand lightly over my erection and then back up slightly harder.

I whimpered her name, tilting my head back and then returned my eyes to her, begging her. She unbuckled my pants and slid them off of me slowly. I ached for her to touch me again. She slid her own pants off and lay down next to me, pressing her nearly naked skin against mine. I slipped my arms around her again, trusting her to slow me down, I scattered kisses on her chest, finally taking her nipple in my mouth and teasing it with my tongue. She moaned and continued to move her hands lightly across my body. I slid my hands down to her thighs and back up between her legs. I moved my hand against the moisture I could feel through the fabric of her panties.

She moaned and her eyes squeezed shut. I ran my hand against her again, slightly harder and then slipped under the fabric. She gasped as I slid my hand against her sex again, pulling her panties away with enough force that I tore them. I was starting to lose control again, my lust was screaming at me to bury myself in her.

She pulled away to slow me down again, meeting my eyes and then placing chaste kisses on my chest, she pushed me onto my back again and calmed me with her gaze and her touch. When I was under control again she slid her hand down to my boxers and slipped her hand under the waistband. Her touch on my shaft was light at first and I pushed my hips at her involuntarily to get more. She kept stroking, pausing only to slip my boxers off. I gazed at her face, taking in her desire and love. I marveled at how open her face was while we were intimate like this; I could see the emotions as they moved across her face, for the first time ever with Bella I knew she loved me, I could see it on her face. My revelation caught me by surprise and I had to kiss her, I had to tell her.

I caught her face in my hands and kissed her deeply. "Isabella, I love you." I whispered, my eyes closed to try to contain the emotion. She trembled in my arms and I opened my eyes to see her look of tenderness and overwhelm. She was trying to open her mouth to say it back to me but I knew it was hard for her.

"Shhh." I whispered. "I know you love me, I can feel it, I can see it. I trust you." She shook and clenched her eyes closed as I said this. I held her until she opened her eyes again and looked at me contentedly.

"Thank you," she said. "I have always loved you. I hope I deserve to love you now." She started touching me again. I wanted to be inside her but I wanted to please her and I knew I needed to take my time.

She had reached my shaft again and stroked it but I was too excited, too hungry. "Bella, I'm going to…you need to stop." She paused and whispered to me, "Are you ready?" watching my face carefully.

"I want to please you. You have to show me how." I was embarrassed at my lack of control. Had I been calmer I could have analyzed, recalled medical school texts, recalled the thoughts of others that I had been horrified to be privy to at the time. But I was too heated, the animal part of me was in charge and I didn't know how to begin.

"Come here." She rolled onto her back and pulled me with her, parting her legs and guiding me to her. I slid into position above her and gazed into her eyes.

She nodded to me and I pushed myself into her slowly, feeling the exquisite friction and depth of her. I stayed in place for a moment, afraid that I would explode in her in that moment. I kissed her tenderly again and slowly began moving against her.

Having her here like this was amazing, beyond my dreams. I continued to move inside her. The feeling was exquisite and I quickly felt momentum building in me.

"Please, Bella." I panted into her neck. "You have to help me." She smiled gently and gripped my hair in her hands. She adjusted her weight under me to change the angle of my thrust.

The new angle changed the tenor of her moans, they became higher pitched and more frantic. I was desperate to hold off until she came, I closed my eyes to reduce my stimulation from that sense. I continued to move against her, trying to keep it slow but unable to control my instinct to push faster.

"Please, Bella, please. Come for me." I was whining now; I knew I couldn't hold off any longer.

Finally, she cried out, jerking her head back into the pillows. I could feel her contracting around me and it drove me over the edge with a roar I'm sure they heard in the main house despite my face being buried in her neck. It was incredible, the most primal moment of my life apart from killing. I finally understood why I had listened to decades of humans and vampires obsess about sex, why my siblings and parents couldn't keep their hands off of each other.

I surfaced from my trembling, ecstatic state and reached out to pull my Isabella to me. She stroked my head and face, giving me closed mouth kisses every once in a while.

"Bella, I am dropping out of high school." I smiled at her once I was calm. "I am going to be too busy doing _that_ with you to go to school."

She laughed at me and then she spent the rest of the night and most of the next three days showing me what I had been missing.


	33. Chapter 33

"_Again and again, however we know the landscape of love_

_and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names,_

_and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others_

_fall: again and again the two of us walk out together_

_under the ancient trees, lie down again and again_

_among the flowers, face to face with the sky."_

_Again And Again, However We Know The Landscape Of Love _

_Rainer Maria Rilke_

**2011**

I married my Isabella that summer in the backyard of my parent's house. We had wanted a small, casual wedding but then Alice got involved and it became a little larger than planned. Against my better judgment I let Carlisle and Esme talk me into inviting the Denali's. Bella's sponsor came as well as a few other friends from the fellowship. Bella had also invited her friend Alistair so we had to keep an eye on the human populace of Forks. Rosalie and Emmett had come back for the summer and I had invited Ben and Angela.

Alice had decided, or rather, she "saw me" decide that I wanted the wedding to look as though it was taking place in 1918. Except that I wanted a jazz band. I tried to tell Alice that no respectable wedding would have had a jazz band in 1918 but she insisted. As did Bella. I was outnumbered and we had a traditional jazz band at our wedding. I suppose I could have felt bothered about having men there who were playing the music that was such an aphrodisiac for my new wife. Except that it gave me a chance to give her my wedding gift.

I had been concerned about what would happen when Tanya met Isabella since Emmett had decided to tell her that Tanya had always pursued me rather energetically. I anticipated fireworks and lurked near them when I saw them being introduced.

To my amazement Bella crowed about Tanya's amazing beauty and said, "I'm so lucky I got my claws in Edward all those years ago or I never would have stood a chance against you." Tanya glowed with pride and satisfaction and from that day saw my wife as a dear friend. I had definitely underestimated Bella's "people" skills.

Alistair was a surprise as well. We were wary of hosting a vampire who didn't share our diet but he was an old acquaintance of Carlisle's who assured us that he could be trusted. He also cared deeply for Isabella and was thrilled to see us together as he revealed he had tried to fix us up years before.

"What are you talking about, you senile old leech?" Isabella batted at his arm playfully, laughing. I looked at him with interest.

"1965 on the French Riviera, Isabella. I tried to convince you to meet Carlisle's handsome son. Don't you remember?" Alistair smiled smugly as I looked at Isabella in amazement.

"That jazz festival. You were wearing a white caftan and carrying an umbrella." I stared at her, wide eyed. She stared back and finally laughed.

"How could you possibly…?"

"I saw you in the thoughts of others. But I had no idea it was you." Isabella looked at me suspiciously and I knew that we would be having a conversation about why I remembered a random brunette from forty-five years before. On the other hand, maybe I could find out how she really looked in a bikini if I told her the whole story.

Bella's sponsor was also pleased for us. I had been concerned that she would have objected due to the speed of our engagement but she had a surprise in store for me as well. She came to congratulate me during the reception, Martinelli's in hand.

After we had exchanged pleasantries she spoke to me quietly, making sure that no one was too close to our conversation.

"It makes me feel better that you will be there to support her when I can't be around." I looked at her in surprise, even with my vampire senses I could detect nothing wrong with her.

"Carol, are you unwell?" She rolled her eyes at me.

"No, Edward, I'm fine but I'm not _immortal_ and I assume that you have to disappear before it becomes obvious that you two don't age."

I looked at her with shock. "Carol, have you been drinking?" I knew that she hadn't but I couldn't admit anything to her without endangering her.

She laughed. "Edward, those two over there said that they just graduated from high school with you." She pointed to Ben and Angela. "Isabella said that she met you three years ago, when she was married. That would have made you fifteen? Fourteen? Alice said she's known Isabella for years but she never met her ex-husband. Isabella didn't know Jasper, Alice's husband until a year ago. Not even getting into what you and your family and your new wife _look _like."

I looked at her carefully. There was no fear in her eyes and there was no joy or triumph at figuring out a big secret.

"We have not been careful," I said slowly. "This could be very dangerous for you to know."

She waved her hand at me dismissively. "I don't want to know any more about it. Your secret is safe with me, I know all about confidentiality. I just want to know that you'll be more careful and that she'll be safe."

"I have waited for her since before your grandparents were born. She is safe with me. I promise that we will be more careful; this year has been an aberration for me. I am generally the soul of caution."

"You will probably have to be, married to Isabella." She laughed and that conversation went no further, thankfully. I was embarrassed that I had not been more discrete but I was confident that Carol would keep our secret.

My sister indicated to me that it was time to give Bella my gift. Walking over to the piano while Alice fetched Bella I indicated to the piano player my desire to take his place. The rest of the musicians set down their instruments as well and took a seat to watch me play the song I had written for my bride. She gave me a curious look as Alice seated her on the piano bench next to me.

I began to play the song I had written for her, a traditional jazz piano arrangement and she began laughing as she heard the words I sang for her:

"_I met my baby in Chicago, so long ago._

_I loved her from the first day I saw her,_

_But that bad, bad women brought me low."_

Bella smiled broadly at me and I was relieved that she wasn't offended by the lyrics.

"_I promised to love her in Chicago,_

_I promised to love her until the day I die,_

_But my baby broke my heart,_

_Broke my heart and made me cry._

_I lost my baby in Chicago,_

_Lost that no-good, evil thing,_

_I lost my life then in Chicago,_

_These Chicago blues I began to sing."_

I could see my family smiling at each other and although many of our guests couldn't understand the meaning of the song they could see the emotion that I had put into it and how Bella was touched by the performance.

"_Then one day that no-good woman,_

_She came back all filled with hate,_

_She came back and tried to kill me,_

_She tried to kill me but it was too late."_

Emmett almost choked with laughter and Rosalie shot him an evil look. I smiled at him and he gave me a thumbs-up and a huge smile.

"_I love that no good, deadly woman_

_Her evil love is all I chose,_

_That evil woman has got me forever,_

_That's why I sing these Chicago blues."_

Isabella barely let my fingers finish the song before she kissed me with a ferocity that took me by surprise. I kissed her back willingly and when we broke apart I could see the fierce love and passion burning in her eyes. I had always had such mixed feelings about jazz but I could see now that I didn't mind spending the rest of my existence playing it for her.

**A/N: That's it! I'm sad to finish this but it was a joy to write. Thank you for all your kind words!**

**I am experimenting in AH. I have a new story; it's Edward/Bella as well, but lighter in tone. It's called "Blind Luck". Come check it out!**

**JuJu**


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